When was this? I remember mention of something called "Brussels Conference 2.0" which seemed to be basically Europa Universalis/Victoria II with a very heavy focus on Africa, but I don't recall anything on the same "stone-age to spaceships" historical scale as Civilization, or discussion about how its mechanics are different from OTL Civ. If you can point me to the post where this is, I'd like to see it. Sounds very interesting.
Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
When was this? I remember mention of something called "Brussels Conference 2.0" which seemed to be basically Europa Universalis/Victoria II with a very heavy focus on Africa, but I don't recall anything on the same "stone-age to spaceships" historical scale as Civilization, or discussion about how its mechanics are different from OTL Civ. If you can point me to the post where this is, I'd like to see it. Sounds very interesting.
Damned if I can remember. It was one of those little tangents where someone- it might even have been me, come to think of it- asked a question about the ATL pop culture and people batted it back and forth before Jonathan put it one of his posts.
I'd look it up, but I really shouldn't be on this website in my work time...
A Stone for the Cathedral
Lisbon, 1943
Alvaro Kalanga had nearly finished breakfast when Police Major Ferreira came calling.
He heard the knock and went to the door to send his visitor away, but then opened it a crack and saw who was there. He unfastened the chain and opened the door wider, standing in the doorway just enough to block entrance without seeming disrespectful.
“I have to go to work, Dom Vicente,” he said. “Can it wait?”
“I’ll give you a note. This is important.”
Alvaro hesitated only a second; unlike some patrons, Ferreira only said something was important when it really was. “Come in then. I have coffee.”
The major walked to the table, sat down as if it were his own, and poured a cup of coffee from the pot. He liked it the way Alvaro did, without milk. He drank slowly, savoring the bitterness, and looked toward the open window.
“Close that,” he said, and as Alvaro obeyed, “I need you to fix something for me.”
“Something African,” Alvaro guessed.
Ferreira nodded. “I’m sorry to trouble you with it, but your mother…”
Alvaro waved away the rest of the apology; he knew who his mother was. “It’s not political, is it?”
“No, no. I know your politics.” In that, too, Ferreira was unlike many other patrons. “It’s… on second thought, let’s go downstairs. The walls have ears in these buildings.”
Alvaro, bemused, followed the major out of his apartment, stopping at the landing to lock the door. Three flights down, the streets were coming alive for the morning. Ferreira led the way silently to the end of the block and turned left; the two of them walked up a narrow street that wound steeply uphill, past buildings painted in sun-bleached pastels or covered in chipped tile. Maybe someday, Alvaro thought as he had many times in the past, it might be his tile on the walls.
There were people on the street too, and others hanging halfway out the windows above, and the air was alive with conversation. Alvaro wondered why Ferreira had taken the meeting down here; the walls might have ears, but the streets had even bigger ones. Then he saw people pointing at them and understood. The major wanted them to be seen together, wanted people to know that anything Alvaro might do was backed by his authority. That did mean something important; it also might mean something dangerous.
“It’s muti,” Ferreira said, pitching his voice low. They turned another corner to a small hillside park. “Someone’s selling it to the women, and people are complaining about being witched with it.”
Alvaro stopped suddenly. “What makes you think I have anything to do with muti?”
“I know you don’t. But your mother was from Lunda, and…”
“Yes.” Muti was something they did in the central African protectorates. It meant medicine, but it was also magic, and some called it witchcraft. “You want to know who it is? So you can tell the priests, stir things up against all the Africans?”
Ferreira reached up and smacked Alvaro on the forehead. “No, you idiot, I want to keep things from getting stirred up. There are a lot of country people in this district, people from the mountains. They believe in witches just as much as the people in the kingdoms do, and if one of them gets sick and thinks an African witch did it...” He trailed off and let Alvaro imagine what might happen after that – what had happened a few times in other neighborhoods and cities.
“You don’t even have to tell me who it is,” he continued. “Just stop it. I’ll make it worth your while. Maybe I can even get you back into the university.”
Alvaro doubted that, but he also knew that if Ferreira gave his word, he would try. And there were other ways the major could repay him.
“Let me go to work,” he said, and Ferreira took that as a yes.
The restoration of the Castelo São Jorge, along with the railroads and the planned neighborhoods, was one of the Novo Reino’s pet projects, a showcase for how proud and wealthy Portugal had become under its rule. There was no love lost between Alvaro and the Novo Reino, but he had no quarrel at all with restoring the country’s history, especially since that meant he had a job.
He sat on the wall with his workmate Manuel, looking down at the city and sharing a flask of vinho verde while the foreman called a ten-minute break. “I don’t like this,” he said.
“He’s your patron.”
That, Alvaro conceded, did say it all. When he’d come to Lisbon to study, his father’s patron in Luanda had recommended him to Ferreira. The major had found him an apartment, and when he’d been expelled from the university and spent six months in prison for separatism, Ferreira had arranged for him to keep the apartment and work as a laborer at the castle. He might be in disgrace with the government and the faculty, but the oaths between him and Ferreira were personal and Ferreira had kept them. Which meant that when the major asked him to do something, he did it – in the Novo Reino, it was that or be an orphan.
“Then where do I start with something like that?” he asked. “It could be anyone in the city.”
“Ask someone who would know. A charm-woman. Surely there’s one here who knew your mother.”
“My mother was Catholic. She never worked charms.”
“She came from one of the families, though. There will be people here who know her name. And even the Catholics go for charms sometimes – even the Portuguese do.”
That much, Alvaro knew all too well, and Manuel’s idea wasn’t a bad one. “I do know someone in the old city…”
“I thought you might.” Manuel laughed and swallowed the last of the wine, and the foreman called them back to work.
At noon, when they broke for three hours, Alvaro wandered down into the Alfama. The streets here were even narrower than in his neighborhood; they’d been here since the Moors ruled and they wandered according to their original plan. Alvaro threaded his way through steep alleys and stairs, dodging the peddlers and meatpie-sellers and the motor-wagons that somehow made their deliveries without knocking down any walls.
“Watch yourself, Moor,” a policeman said when he didn’t get out of the way fast enough. He bit down a reply as he realized the officer had spoken without malice, that his “Moor” was the casual insult of someone who’d forgotten it was an insult. There was no need to tell this man that his father’s family had been Catholic for four hundred years and that they’d been noble before they ever met the Portuguese. And if I did tell him, what then? That was how I went to prison.
There were things that needed to change, Alvaro thought, but they wouldn’t change now, and the thought carried him around the corner to another stairway. The door of Mãe Teresa’s building was halfway down, and Teresa herself was leaning out the second-story window having an animated conversation with the Portuguese woman across the way. In Lisbon as in Luanda, it seemed to be a law of nature that upper-story women were either mortal enemies or best friends, and Mãe Teresa had no enemies.
“You came to see me?” she called – she had a preternatural sense for customers.
“Yes.” She would ask his business next, he knew, and he searched for a way to explain it in a way that wouldn’t tell the whole street what it was. Finally, he switched to Chilunda and said “I need to speak to you in this language.”
Mãe Teresa nodded quickly and motioned him to the door. He wasn’t surprised she understood; she was from Bissau somewhere, not Angola or even Mozambique, but charm-women knew all the languages, and she knew that when the son of a Kongo nobleman spoke Lunda, his business was sensitive.
Inside, Teresa had already set out a pot of tea. She’d been weaving before she stopped to talk to her neighbor; a half-finished piece of raffia cloth was on the loom, arranged in concentric diamond patterns of yellow, black and red. Mãe Teresa made dresses as well as charms; many of the African women wore them so they’d have something to remind them of home. She was wearing one of them herself now in a pattern Alvaro had never seen, along with a brilliant hair-tie that shimmered with silver thread.
He studied that pattern as well as the one on the loom; he was bursting with questions, but no one talked business at Mãe Teresa’s before they were finished with tea. To calm himself, he began sketching the pattern instead, drawing it as if it were on building tiles, rearranging it so that it formed a nine-tile symmetry.
“You like the design?”
He nodded, saying nothing. The tiled buildings in Portugal had been a fascination of Alvaro’s since he’d first seen them, and he dreamed of making them with African patterns – why shouldn’t there be such tiles in the neighborhoods where people from the colonies had settled? He’d have preferred a Kongo design, but failing that, there was nothing wrong with one from Bussau…
He looked up and saw that Teresa was waiting for him to finish his cup. “I’m sorry for taking your time, mãe…”
“Don’t worry. I like when you draw. It takes you to another place, I can see.” Her voice suddenly dropped a register and she spoke Chilunda. “And why did you come to see me – something also from another place?”
“I need to know if someone is doing muti here. My patron is worried it will cause trouble.”
“The police major?” Mãe Teresa sank into a chair and thought. “I’ve heard of that, yes. My customers know to come only to me, but a couple of them have heard things from their neighbors and they’re worried that someone will witch them or steal their children. My Angolans believe all kinds of things about people from the kingdoms.”
“So do the Portuguese.”
“I know. Your major is right – if any of that gets into the wrong place, it could be trouble with the police, trouble with the Church. We’ve got enough of that already.”
“Do you know who he is? Have you heard a name?”
“They call him ‘the doctor’ – yes, I know that doesn’t help. But they say he’s from Yeke.”
Alvaro nodded; that, at least, was a start. There weren’t many people from Yeke in Portugal; the Portuguese miners who went to work there and the local women they married tended to stay, and those from the country lacked the patronage to move overseas. But there were always some who came to learn, or to buy and sell, or to escape from the provinces where the law ending forced labor was still a cruel fiction.
“Anything more? What nation is he? When did he come?”
“The first I don’t know, except that he isn’t Luba. The second – I also don’t know for sure, but I’ve only heard of him in the past two or three months.”
That fit – three months might be just enough time for ‘the doctor,’ whoever he was, to establish himself enough to have a Portuguese clientele.
“Thank you, mãe.” He reached into his pocket but she waved him down.
“Remember me to your police major,” she said, speaking Portuguese again – an appropriate language to talk about patronage and connections. “And if you want, I can show you another pattern.”
Back at the castle, there was more work to do. They were training Alvaro for a stone cutter’s job, but he was still classified as general labor, and many wagons had arrived with supplies to unload. There were stones from the quarry to manhandle off the wagon-beds, and there was mortar, and there were tiles.
Alvaro carried a load of them to the corner where the painters had set up shop. He put them down on a makeshift table and picked one up, studying the underglaze and running his fingers along the base pattern. He must have studied it a little too long, because the foreman saw him and shouted, “you’ve got work to do, Moor.”
“He asked me to take him on as an apprentice once,” the foreman said to another worker as Alvaro turned to leave. “He’s Angolan – I might as well try to teach a monkey.”
The words stung less than when Alvaro had first heard them, but not much. If he’d been a Mozambican, the foreman might have taken him on – in the mythology that the Portuguese had created about their colonies, the Mozambicans were the artistic ones, the musicians and sculptors. Angolans were workers, farmers, soldiers – the stolid, religious people who were the backbone of the state. Alvaro was all that, but he also thought he might be more.
“Let it go,” Manuel said – he was from back-country Angola himself and he’d heard. “You make good designs, but they don’t hire us. You should never have asked him – you gave him a hold on you.” Manuel shook his head, disclaiming any such weakness himself.
“What about people from Yeke?”
“They probably wouldn’t hire them either.”
“No, no – I mean the one I have to find. The mãe says he’s from there. Do you know anyone?”
“Why would I know anyone from Yeke? But I could ask in the barraca – that’s where they’d probably be.”
"Yes, can you ask when you get home?” The barracas – the shantytowns on the outskirts of the city – were where many of the Africans lived: Manuel’s home was there, and a newcomer from Yeke without access to the patronage networks would most likely be there too.
“I’ll have to be careful – I could get in trouble there if they find out I’m asking about police business. And it might cost me.”
Alvaro nodded and brought out the ten escudos that Mãe Teresa hadn’t let him give her. There were some favors that friendship alone wouldn’t buy, and Manuel probably would need to spread some of it around. Then another wagonload of stone pulled up and he went back to work.
The last whistle blew two hours later, and Alvaro went to pray at the cathedral. It wasn’t his regular church, but it was close by, and at times like this he found it inspiring. King Afonso had ordered the first stone laid in the same year that the Christians had taken Lisbon from the Moors, and it had been finished almost a hundred years later. He could imagine himself in the workers’ place, feel their faith that the cathedral would be completed even though they wouldn’t live to see it. His work – his real work, the cause he’d gone to prison for – was much the same, and tangled in Portuguese notions of Africa as he now was, the church was a reminder that such things wouldn’t last forever.
“You look troubled, my son,” he heard, and he saw that a priest had come to the bench where he was kneeling. “Have you come to pray for someone who is ill?”
For a moment, Alvaro thought of telling the priest what he was looking for – priests learned things, and those in the cathedral more so. But who knew what he might make of that question? If he thought that Alvaro himself was seeking magical remedies – or, worse, that he was practicing them – there could be trouble. The Church couldn’t bring criminal charges anymore, but Alvaro might suddenly find that no one would sell to him and that even Ferreira couldn’t keep him in his job.
“I’m praying for my mother,” he said instead. “A muti doctor put a curse on her and she’s very sick.” He asked God silently to forgive the lie, and realized as he did that he wasn’t being completely untruthful. Witchcraft had killed his mother – not because she practiced it or was cursed with it, but because his father’s family had refused to believe that a Lunda woman with her name wasn’t a witch, and because their shunning had eventually sapped her will to live.
Not entirely to Alvaro’s surprise, the priest recognized the word “muti.” “That’s an evil thing,” he said. “They say it comes from the heathens in São Miguel barraca. It belongs to the devil, and if your mother’s faith is strong, she will recover. Is her faith strong?”
“Yes, Father.” That was no lie at all – his mother had loved God more than anyone he knew. “Can you give me some prayers for her to say?”
“I will,” the priest said, and did so; afterward, he knelt next to Alvaro and said a short prayer himself. “Do you want to confess?”
“Not now, Father – I do confession at Santa Clara in Pena.”
The priest said nothing, but Alvaro could see him stiffen. “Dias,” he murmured as he stood up, and he gave Alvaro a disapproving look. The priest at Santa Clara was indeed a follower of Cardinal Dias: he was Angolan, and he believed as the Archbishop of Luanda did that Portugal must treat its African subjects as citizens. Alvaro, a separatist, thought he didn’t go far enough; this priest, looking from the other direction and wary of the currents that were sweeping the Church from the west and south, saw a Moor who didn’t know his place.
There were still many stones to be laid before the cathedral was finished.
Alvaro waited until the priest had found another person to attend and then stood up himself; his inspiration was gone, but Manuel’s guess that the muti doctor came from the barracas was confirmed and he now knew which one he should start with. Tomorrow, he thought, he would go there. It would be dangerous to just walk in and ask questions, and he ran through a mental file of people he knew; there was another charm-woman there, and if he mentioned Mãe Teresa’s name – or maybe his mother’s – then she might tell him something…
These thoughts carried him to his own neighborhood, and so preoccupied was he with averting tomorrow’s danger that he almost failed to see the one that approached now. He turned a corner onto a narrow street, buildings looming over him in the gathering darkness, and a change in the shadows suddenly alerted him to the presence of people behind him. He risked a glance backward and saw three men following. Any doubt as to whether they were there for him vanished when they noticed his glance and quickened their step; ahead, two more men, African like those behind, appeared in the next intersection.
Alvaro thought furiously. He’d already let them get too close; there was no easy way past them, and here in Pena, no one would intervene. Major Ferreira’s name, whatever magic it might work in the daytime, was likely to be more curse than blessing with these people.
He felt the men behind him break into a run and he did the same. The two ahead of him stepped in to block his path. An alley flashed past – a dead end, and something chittered mockingly from the shadows – and as Alvaro picked one of the men ahead to attack, he saw the other move to intercept him…
Suddenly he turned on his heel and doubled back. He hoped he hadn’t telegraphed the move, and indeed he hadn’t; the first of his pursuers kept coming at full tilt, and Alvaro spun and drove a fist into his face. Before the man could recover, Alvaro seized him by the arm, barely noticing the intricately knotted ropes that he wore around his wrists, and flung him into the two who followed. He felt a blow to the head from behind and then another – the two men from the intersection had caught up with him – but then he was past the pursuers and sprinting back the way he came.
He kept running. They had regrouped and were chasing him again so he ran, not stopping even when the street wound steeply upward and his lungs screamed in pain. He was running away from his home, but there was no help for it; he seemed to be distancing his pursuers but he wasn’t certain, and he knew that if he stopped for a moment, they’d be on him.
A light appeared up the street, and Alvaro felt a sudden relief; by sheer accident, or maybe by providence, the Inhambane shebeen was in the path of his flight. He would be protected inside; there would be many witnesses who knew him, and strangers would no more dare attack him there than they would at the cathedral. He put on a final burst of speed, his entire body straining with the effort, and dashed inside just before the fastest of the men behind could tackle him. The man looked inside, raised a knotted arm to Alvaro, and kept going.
Deep in the Inhambane, almost no one noticed Alvaro’s entry. The light dimmed to almost nothing two meters from the door, and the sound of the band playing on the jerry-built stage masked the commotion outside. The music played on as if nothing had happened, because to the people listening raptly at the candlelit tables, nothing had.
Amália, the young Portuguese woman who waited tables when it wasn’t her night to sing, did see him – it was her job to see him. “Alvaro!” she began, but her voice faded as she looked closer. “You’re bleeding. What happened?”
“I went looking for a doctor.”
“Doctors are supposed to fix you when something happens.” She pushed him into a chair, poured rum on a clean rag and wiped the blood from his head, ignoring his wince as she rubbed alcohol into the cut. “What kind of doctor does that?”
“Not one you want to know,” he said. “Not one I’d want to know if I had a choice.” He pointed to the stage, where the band was finishing a fast zambo number that might have come straight from Lourenço Marques. “When does Luis get done?”
“Three more songs. Here, I’ll bring you some wine.” Amália pointed him to an empty corner table and, a few minutes later, brought a bottle of vinho verde.
Alvaro let the shadows and music surround him. The zambo song was followed by a slow, melancholy fado, with Luis’ Portuguese guitarist taking a turn at the microphone. After that, another zambo, and then a morna from Cape Verde that had been written for a woman’s voice but which Luis sang surprisingly well. The band took its bows, and Alvaro almost didn’t notice when Luis, evidently tipped off by Amália, came to sit beside him.
Alvaro poured a second glass from the bottle. “Who’s that?” he asked, motioning toward the singer who’d taken Luis’ place.
“Senegalese – here from Paris. The students like him.” Alvaro followed Luis’ eyes through cigarette smoke to the students at the front tables, most of them Portuguese and many of whom had rings from French or German universities. He’d spoken to a few of them on occasion; they always talked about how repressive and provincial the Novo Reino seemed after Paris and Berlin, and they liked hearing the music they’d come to know there.
Some of them were pounding on the tables. “Dias! Dias!” they shouted, and Alvaro realized that though the new singer was from Senegal, the theme of his song was Portuguese. “It is time for a new day to last forever, when all of us stand before God together…”
“Speaking of which,” Alvaro said to Luis in Chilunda, “I’ve got business from the kingdoms. A Yeke doctor in São Miguel – do you know him?” Luis was Lunda and a freethinker; muti wouldn’t scare him.
“The muti man,” Luis answered, and Alvaro exulted inwardly. “No, I haven’t seen him, but…”
“But what?” The Senegalese singer had launched into something loud, something called “The Knot,” and whatever Luis had said was too low to be heard.
“The knot, just like he said.” Luis was smiling at the coincidence. “I heard they brought him.”
Alvaro had never heard of anyone by that name, but there was something naggingly familiar about it. The singer had begun another verse in which the knot was drawn in light rather than tied, and suddenly he made the connection.
It wasn’t the song and it wasn’t the rope that Alvaro remembered – it was the tiles. He’d learned, years ago at the university, that many of the earliest Portuguese tiles followed a knotted pattern, and that the pattern had originally come from the Moors. And he knew who in the colonies had adopted that pattern as their own.
It was political after all.
“You told them,” Alvaro said to Manuel the next morning at the castle.
“I swear I didn’t. I asked around last night like I said, and I mentioned it to Dom Fernando. He’d want to know about something like that. He must have passed it on.”
“Fernando?” Alvaro repeated, but more in resignation than anger. He couldn’t fault Manuel for telling his patron; as he’d admitted himself the previous morning, without a patron you were nothing. “But why would he…”
“He’s the boss of Dias’ party in São Miguel,” Manuel said, obviously trying to think it through. Alvaro nodded; he already knew that much. Oddly enough, political parties operated more freely in the barracas than anywhere else in metropolitan Portugal; as far as the Novo Reino was concerned, the shantytowns didn’t exist, so it took much more to catch the censors’ attention. And whichever party controlled a barraca could recruit workers and collect tithes for its cause.
In other places, such control might be decided by elections, but in the barracas that would be a step too far even if the bosses were truly interested in them. Which most of them weren’t…
“He’s working with the Catholic Liberals now and against the separatists,” Manuel was saying. “The socialists are trying to stay out of the way, and I thought the Knot was too, but maybe they’ve worked something out with Dom Fernando, or they’re trying to.”
“Maybe. But why would they bring in a muti doctor from Yeke?”
“Dom Fernando didn’t tell me that. He didn’t tell me he knew the man at all.”
Alvaro got up from the wall and looked down at the city again. “Then I need to find out. The more this goes outside the barraca, the more trouble for all of us. I’m going - tell the foreman Major Ferreira will take care of him.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“I know,” Alvaro said, thinking of the stones left to add to the cathedral and how close it might be to tumbling down. “But I’m sick to death of being careful.”
The streets of the barracas, strangely enough, were wider than those of the Alfama or Pena. Roma people had camped at the edges of the city since time out of mind, but most of those who lived there today, barring a few bewildered Timorese, were from the African colonies, and by the time they came, motor-wagons had already been invented. So the houses of clapboard and corrugated metal, and the open sewers on each side of the streets, were set far enough apart for wagons to pass.
Alvaro counted himself fortunate never to have lived in a barraca – university students didn’t stay there, and even after he’d gone to prison, he’d had a job and a strong patron. But he’d been there before. Africans, especially those who had politics, could hardly avoid going to the barracas sometime; there were things that could only be said there and imports that were sold nowhere else. So when he got off the back of a delivery wagon and stepped carefully around the sewers and the piles of refuse, he knew where he was going.
This shebeen had no name and it was made of the same materials as the houses, but Alvaro could hear the music half a street away. It was a fado like none he’d heard before, as slow and mournful as any that were played in the sailors’ taverns but one that borrowed its rhythms from central Africa, and as he stepped inside, he saw that the singer was half Luba and half Roma. He was instantly sure that her parents’ families had disowned them, and he wondered how they’d even said enough to each other to decide to marry. He remembered his father and mother, and remembered that all things came from God.
He took a table by the door and called to the waiter. “Bring me a bottle of red wine,” he said, “and send someone to where the Belloists meet. Tell the boss I’ll wait for him here.”
“Dom Agostinho?” the waiter asked incredulously. “Are you crazy? No one just asks Dom Agostinho to come meet him.”
“I’m asking now.”
“And who the hell are you?”
“Tell him I’m coming from Police Major Ferreira – he’ll know I’m not lying. Tell him I’m here to stop trouble, not start it.”
“It’s your funeral.” The waiter opened the wine bottle and disappeared out a back door. Alvaro sat and drank and listened to the singer. She was good; she was haunting, she was better than this place. So many others also were. Stones for the cathedral.
Ten minutes later, Dom Agostinho came in.
He was from Mozambique, Alvaro could tell; from the north, where the coastal peoples had learned of Islam from the Yao. He was no Muslim, though; he wore a cross along with his knot. A Belloist Catholic – well, the Mozambicans were supposed to be the creative ones.
Alvaro took refuge once again in audacity. “I thought Belloists weren’t supposed to be political,” he said.
“Are we? We’re building a self-contained community here, all Africans together – separate from all the factions.” Alvaro was skeptical, but Dom Agostinho’s face grew animated as he explained, and it took him a second to realize that he was talking to the person who’d sent him a peremptory summons. He sat and poured himself a cup of wine. “Tell me,” he said, “why I shouldn’t leave your body somewhere on the hill.”
“Does Dom Fernando know you brought a muti doctor here?”
“Dom Fernando…”
“No? You held something back when you went to him for a deal? He does know now, and it’s a problem for you. Maybe I can stop that.”
“I can stop it myself. That’s not enough to let you walk out of here.”
“You brought him to do what – scare the separatists and the Catholic Liberals, make them come over and work for you? Very apolitical… but did you know that he’s seeing Portuguese women on the side?”
That finally made Agostinho put his glass down. “He’s doing what?”
“He’s selling muti to the Portuguese in Pena – maybe other parts of the city too. That’s why the major sent me here. Someone thinks her neighbor got witched by a Yeke doctor – the police come, the priests come, the mobs come, trouble for all of us. São Miguel has been burned out before. It can happen again, destroy everything you’re trying to build.”
“What do you care? You’re a separatist.”
Somehow, it didn’t surprise Alvaro that Dom Agostinho knew about him. “It will take all of us together to bring the Novo Reino down.”
“Maybe so.” Agostinho looked uncommonly thoughtful as he poured more wine. “The doctor – I never told him to go outside São Miguel. I’ll make sure he stays.”
“Major Ferreira will make sure. And me – do you know who my mother was?”
“Yes. That’s why you’ll go home tonight instead of the graveyard.” The Knot boss waved a hand at the singer in back of the shebeen. “Tell your major that if he wants to show his gratitude, he’ll get her a booking in the city. And you – don’t come back.”
“I hope I don’t have to.”
“I’m sorry,” Major Ferreira said. “I went to the university but I couldn’t do anything. They said you can’t go back – the order is from the government.”
“I didn’t think you could, Dom Vicente.”
“There will be something else. I pay my debts.”
Alvaro sat on a bench; they were in the same hillside park they’d been in two days before, and the smell of cooking drifted through the air as food-sellers set up for the morning. “There may be something else you can do,” he said. “Do you know any tilemakers?”
Whatever the major had expected Alvaro to say, it obviously wasn’t that. “Are you any good?”
Alvaro took his sketchbook out of his pocket and held it out silently. Ferreira flipped through it, and disbelief changed to… something else.
“I know someone in Bairro Alto,” he said slowly. “He has a small shop and his apprentice just left.”
“Does he like Angolans?”
“He’ll take you on if I tell him to.” Alvaro caught the silent warning: the rest would be up to him. A stone for the cathedral, maybe.
“It’ll pay less than you’re getting now at the castle,” the major continued.
“I can live with that.”
“Maybe you can. And I pay my debts. Go to work today and go to him tomorrow morning.”
The two men shook hands and Alvaro walked downhill toward home. They’d need everyone together to bring the Novo Reino down, he’d said; maybe the major could be part of that as well.
That was something he might learn tomorrow.
Alvaro Kalanga had nearly finished breakfast when Police Major Ferreira came calling.
He heard the knock and went to the door to send his visitor away, but then opened it a crack and saw who was there. He unfastened the chain and opened the door wider, standing in the doorway just enough to block entrance without seeming disrespectful.
“I have to go to work, Dom Vicente,” he said. “Can it wait?”
“I’ll give you a note. This is important.”
Alvaro hesitated only a second; unlike some patrons, Ferreira only said something was important when it really was. “Come in then. I have coffee.”
The major walked to the table, sat down as if it were his own, and poured a cup of coffee from the pot. He liked it the way Alvaro did, without milk. He drank slowly, savoring the bitterness, and looked toward the open window.
“Close that,” he said, and as Alvaro obeyed, “I need you to fix something for me.”
“Something African,” Alvaro guessed.
Ferreira nodded. “I’m sorry to trouble you with it, but your mother…”
Alvaro waved away the rest of the apology; he knew who his mother was. “It’s not political, is it?”
“No, no. I know your politics.” In that, too, Ferreira was unlike many other patrons. “It’s… on second thought, let’s go downstairs. The walls have ears in these buildings.”
Alvaro, bemused, followed the major out of his apartment, stopping at the landing to lock the door. Three flights down, the streets were coming alive for the morning. Ferreira led the way silently to the end of the block and turned left; the two of them walked up a narrow street that wound steeply uphill, past buildings painted in sun-bleached pastels or covered in chipped tile. Maybe someday, Alvaro thought as he had many times in the past, it might be his tile on the walls.
There were people on the street too, and others hanging halfway out the windows above, and the air was alive with conversation. Alvaro wondered why Ferreira had taken the meeting down here; the walls might have ears, but the streets had even bigger ones. Then he saw people pointing at them and understood. The major wanted them to be seen together, wanted people to know that anything Alvaro might do was backed by his authority. That did mean something important; it also might mean something dangerous.
“It’s muti,” Ferreira said, pitching his voice low. They turned another corner to a small hillside park. “Someone’s selling it to the women, and people are complaining about being witched with it.”
Alvaro stopped suddenly. “What makes you think I have anything to do with muti?”
“I know you don’t. But your mother was from Lunda, and…”
“Yes.” Muti was something they did in the central African protectorates. It meant medicine, but it was also magic, and some called it witchcraft. “You want to know who it is? So you can tell the priests, stir things up against all the Africans?”
Ferreira reached up and smacked Alvaro on the forehead. “No, you idiot, I want to keep things from getting stirred up. There are a lot of country people in this district, people from the mountains. They believe in witches just as much as the people in the kingdoms do, and if one of them gets sick and thinks an African witch did it...” He trailed off and let Alvaro imagine what might happen after that – what had happened a few times in other neighborhoods and cities.
“You don’t even have to tell me who it is,” he continued. “Just stop it. I’ll make it worth your while. Maybe I can even get you back into the university.”
Alvaro doubted that, but he also knew that if Ferreira gave his word, he would try. And there were other ways the major could repay him.
“Let me go to work,” he said, and Ferreira took that as a yes.
#
The restoration of the Castelo São Jorge, along with the railroads and the planned neighborhoods, was one of the Novo Reino’s pet projects, a showcase for how proud and wealthy Portugal had become under its rule. There was no love lost between Alvaro and the Novo Reino, but he had no quarrel at all with restoring the country’s history, especially since that meant he had a job.
He sat on the wall with his workmate Manuel, looking down at the city and sharing a flask of vinho verde while the foreman called a ten-minute break. “I don’t like this,” he said.
“He’s your patron.”
That, Alvaro conceded, did say it all. When he’d come to Lisbon to study, his father’s patron in Luanda had recommended him to Ferreira. The major had found him an apartment, and when he’d been expelled from the university and spent six months in prison for separatism, Ferreira had arranged for him to keep the apartment and work as a laborer at the castle. He might be in disgrace with the government and the faculty, but the oaths between him and Ferreira were personal and Ferreira had kept them. Which meant that when the major asked him to do something, he did it – in the Novo Reino, it was that or be an orphan.
“Then where do I start with something like that?” he asked. “It could be anyone in the city.”
“Ask someone who would know. A charm-woman. Surely there’s one here who knew your mother.”
“My mother was Catholic. She never worked charms.”
“She came from one of the families, though. There will be people here who know her name. And even the Catholics go for charms sometimes – even the Portuguese do.”
That much, Alvaro knew all too well, and Manuel’s idea wasn’t a bad one. “I do know someone in the old city…”
“I thought you might.” Manuel laughed and swallowed the last of the wine, and the foreman called them back to work.
At noon, when they broke for three hours, Alvaro wandered down into the Alfama. The streets here were even narrower than in his neighborhood; they’d been here since the Moors ruled and they wandered according to their original plan. Alvaro threaded his way through steep alleys and stairs, dodging the peddlers and meatpie-sellers and the motor-wagons that somehow made their deliveries without knocking down any walls.
“Watch yourself, Moor,” a policeman said when he didn’t get out of the way fast enough. He bit down a reply as he realized the officer had spoken without malice, that his “Moor” was the casual insult of someone who’d forgotten it was an insult. There was no need to tell this man that his father’s family had been Catholic for four hundred years and that they’d been noble before they ever met the Portuguese. And if I did tell him, what then? That was how I went to prison.
There were things that needed to change, Alvaro thought, but they wouldn’t change now, and the thought carried him around the corner to another stairway. The door of Mãe Teresa’s building was halfway down, and Teresa herself was leaning out the second-story window having an animated conversation with the Portuguese woman across the way. In Lisbon as in Luanda, it seemed to be a law of nature that upper-story women were either mortal enemies or best friends, and Mãe Teresa had no enemies.
“You came to see me?” she called – she had a preternatural sense for customers.
“Yes.” She would ask his business next, he knew, and he searched for a way to explain it in a way that wouldn’t tell the whole street what it was. Finally, he switched to Chilunda and said “I need to speak to you in this language.”
Mãe Teresa nodded quickly and motioned him to the door. He wasn’t surprised she understood; she was from Bissau somewhere, not Angola or even Mozambique, but charm-women knew all the languages, and she knew that when the son of a Kongo nobleman spoke Lunda, his business was sensitive.
Inside, Teresa had already set out a pot of tea. She’d been weaving before she stopped to talk to her neighbor; a half-finished piece of raffia cloth was on the loom, arranged in concentric diamond patterns of yellow, black and red. Mãe Teresa made dresses as well as charms; many of the African women wore them so they’d have something to remind them of home. She was wearing one of them herself now in a pattern Alvaro had never seen, along with a brilliant hair-tie that shimmered with silver thread.
He studied that pattern as well as the one on the loom; he was bursting with questions, but no one talked business at Mãe Teresa’s before they were finished with tea. To calm himself, he began sketching the pattern instead, drawing it as if it were on building tiles, rearranging it so that it formed a nine-tile symmetry.
“You like the design?”
He nodded, saying nothing. The tiled buildings in Portugal had been a fascination of Alvaro’s since he’d first seen them, and he dreamed of making them with African patterns – why shouldn’t there be such tiles in the neighborhoods where people from the colonies had settled? He’d have preferred a Kongo design, but failing that, there was nothing wrong with one from Bussau…
He looked up and saw that Teresa was waiting for him to finish his cup. “I’m sorry for taking your time, mãe…”
“Don’t worry. I like when you draw. It takes you to another place, I can see.” Her voice suddenly dropped a register and she spoke Chilunda. “And why did you come to see me – something also from another place?”
“I need to know if someone is doing muti here. My patron is worried it will cause trouble.”
“The police major?” Mãe Teresa sank into a chair and thought. “I’ve heard of that, yes. My customers know to come only to me, but a couple of them have heard things from their neighbors and they’re worried that someone will witch them or steal their children. My Angolans believe all kinds of things about people from the kingdoms.”
“So do the Portuguese.”
“I know. Your major is right – if any of that gets into the wrong place, it could be trouble with the police, trouble with the Church. We’ve got enough of that already.”
“Do you know who he is? Have you heard a name?”
“They call him ‘the doctor’ – yes, I know that doesn’t help. But they say he’s from Yeke.”
Alvaro nodded; that, at least, was a start. There weren’t many people from Yeke in Portugal; the Portuguese miners who went to work there and the local women they married tended to stay, and those from the country lacked the patronage to move overseas. But there were always some who came to learn, or to buy and sell, or to escape from the provinces where the law ending forced labor was still a cruel fiction.
“Anything more? What nation is he? When did he come?”
“The first I don’t know, except that he isn’t Luba. The second – I also don’t know for sure, but I’ve only heard of him in the past two or three months.”
That fit – three months might be just enough time for ‘the doctor,’ whoever he was, to establish himself enough to have a Portuguese clientele.
“Thank you, mãe.” He reached into his pocket but she waved him down.
“Remember me to your police major,” she said, speaking Portuguese again – an appropriate language to talk about patronage and connections. “And if you want, I can show you another pattern.”
#
Back at the castle, there was more work to do. They were training Alvaro for a stone cutter’s job, but he was still classified as general labor, and many wagons had arrived with supplies to unload. There were stones from the quarry to manhandle off the wagon-beds, and there was mortar, and there were tiles.
Alvaro carried a load of them to the corner where the painters had set up shop. He put them down on a makeshift table and picked one up, studying the underglaze and running his fingers along the base pattern. He must have studied it a little too long, because the foreman saw him and shouted, “you’ve got work to do, Moor.”
“He asked me to take him on as an apprentice once,” the foreman said to another worker as Alvaro turned to leave. “He’s Angolan – I might as well try to teach a monkey.”
The words stung less than when Alvaro had first heard them, but not much. If he’d been a Mozambican, the foreman might have taken him on – in the mythology that the Portuguese had created about their colonies, the Mozambicans were the artistic ones, the musicians and sculptors. Angolans were workers, farmers, soldiers – the stolid, religious people who were the backbone of the state. Alvaro was all that, but he also thought he might be more.
“Let it go,” Manuel said – he was from back-country Angola himself and he’d heard. “You make good designs, but they don’t hire us. You should never have asked him – you gave him a hold on you.” Manuel shook his head, disclaiming any such weakness himself.
“What about people from Yeke?”
“They probably wouldn’t hire them either.”
“No, no – I mean the one I have to find. The mãe says he’s from there. Do you know anyone?”
“Why would I know anyone from Yeke? But I could ask in the barraca – that’s where they’d probably be.”
"Yes, can you ask when you get home?” The barracas – the shantytowns on the outskirts of the city – were where many of the Africans lived: Manuel’s home was there, and a newcomer from Yeke without access to the patronage networks would most likely be there too.
“I’ll have to be careful – I could get in trouble there if they find out I’m asking about police business. And it might cost me.”
Alvaro nodded and brought out the ten escudos that Mãe Teresa hadn’t let him give her. There were some favors that friendship alone wouldn’t buy, and Manuel probably would need to spread some of it around. Then another wagonload of stone pulled up and he went back to work.
#
The last whistle blew two hours later, and Alvaro went to pray at the cathedral. It wasn’t his regular church, but it was close by, and at times like this he found it inspiring. King Afonso had ordered the first stone laid in the same year that the Christians had taken Lisbon from the Moors, and it had been finished almost a hundred years later. He could imagine himself in the workers’ place, feel their faith that the cathedral would be completed even though they wouldn’t live to see it. His work – his real work, the cause he’d gone to prison for – was much the same, and tangled in Portuguese notions of Africa as he now was, the church was a reminder that such things wouldn’t last forever.
“You look troubled, my son,” he heard, and he saw that a priest had come to the bench where he was kneeling. “Have you come to pray for someone who is ill?”
For a moment, Alvaro thought of telling the priest what he was looking for – priests learned things, and those in the cathedral more so. But who knew what he might make of that question? If he thought that Alvaro himself was seeking magical remedies – or, worse, that he was practicing them – there could be trouble. The Church couldn’t bring criminal charges anymore, but Alvaro might suddenly find that no one would sell to him and that even Ferreira couldn’t keep him in his job.
“I’m praying for my mother,” he said instead. “A muti doctor put a curse on her and she’s very sick.” He asked God silently to forgive the lie, and realized as he did that he wasn’t being completely untruthful. Witchcraft had killed his mother – not because she practiced it or was cursed with it, but because his father’s family had refused to believe that a Lunda woman with her name wasn’t a witch, and because their shunning had eventually sapped her will to live.
Not entirely to Alvaro’s surprise, the priest recognized the word “muti.” “That’s an evil thing,” he said. “They say it comes from the heathens in São Miguel barraca. It belongs to the devil, and if your mother’s faith is strong, she will recover. Is her faith strong?”
“Yes, Father.” That was no lie at all – his mother had loved God more than anyone he knew. “Can you give me some prayers for her to say?”
“I will,” the priest said, and did so; afterward, he knelt next to Alvaro and said a short prayer himself. “Do you want to confess?”
“Not now, Father – I do confession at Santa Clara in Pena.”
The priest said nothing, but Alvaro could see him stiffen. “Dias,” he murmured as he stood up, and he gave Alvaro a disapproving look. The priest at Santa Clara was indeed a follower of Cardinal Dias: he was Angolan, and he believed as the Archbishop of Luanda did that Portugal must treat its African subjects as citizens. Alvaro, a separatist, thought he didn’t go far enough; this priest, looking from the other direction and wary of the currents that were sweeping the Church from the west and south, saw a Moor who didn’t know his place.
There were still many stones to be laid before the cathedral was finished.
Alvaro waited until the priest had found another person to attend and then stood up himself; his inspiration was gone, but Manuel’s guess that the muti doctor came from the barracas was confirmed and he now knew which one he should start with. Tomorrow, he thought, he would go there. It would be dangerous to just walk in and ask questions, and he ran through a mental file of people he knew; there was another charm-woman there, and if he mentioned Mãe Teresa’s name – or maybe his mother’s – then she might tell him something…
These thoughts carried him to his own neighborhood, and so preoccupied was he with averting tomorrow’s danger that he almost failed to see the one that approached now. He turned a corner onto a narrow street, buildings looming over him in the gathering darkness, and a change in the shadows suddenly alerted him to the presence of people behind him. He risked a glance backward and saw three men following. Any doubt as to whether they were there for him vanished when they noticed his glance and quickened their step; ahead, two more men, African like those behind, appeared in the next intersection.
Alvaro thought furiously. He’d already let them get too close; there was no easy way past them, and here in Pena, no one would intervene. Major Ferreira’s name, whatever magic it might work in the daytime, was likely to be more curse than blessing with these people.
He felt the men behind him break into a run and he did the same. The two ahead of him stepped in to block his path. An alley flashed past – a dead end, and something chittered mockingly from the shadows – and as Alvaro picked one of the men ahead to attack, he saw the other move to intercept him…
Suddenly he turned on his heel and doubled back. He hoped he hadn’t telegraphed the move, and indeed he hadn’t; the first of his pursuers kept coming at full tilt, and Alvaro spun and drove a fist into his face. Before the man could recover, Alvaro seized him by the arm, barely noticing the intricately knotted ropes that he wore around his wrists, and flung him into the two who followed. He felt a blow to the head from behind and then another – the two men from the intersection had caught up with him – but then he was past the pursuers and sprinting back the way he came.
He kept running. They had regrouped and were chasing him again so he ran, not stopping even when the street wound steeply upward and his lungs screamed in pain. He was running away from his home, but there was no help for it; he seemed to be distancing his pursuers but he wasn’t certain, and he knew that if he stopped for a moment, they’d be on him.
A light appeared up the street, and Alvaro felt a sudden relief; by sheer accident, or maybe by providence, the Inhambane shebeen was in the path of his flight. He would be protected inside; there would be many witnesses who knew him, and strangers would no more dare attack him there than they would at the cathedral. He put on a final burst of speed, his entire body straining with the effort, and dashed inside just before the fastest of the men behind could tackle him. The man looked inside, raised a knotted arm to Alvaro, and kept going.
#
Deep in the Inhambane, almost no one noticed Alvaro’s entry. The light dimmed to almost nothing two meters from the door, and the sound of the band playing on the jerry-built stage masked the commotion outside. The music played on as if nothing had happened, because to the people listening raptly at the candlelit tables, nothing had.
Amália, the young Portuguese woman who waited tables when it wasn’t her night to sing, did see him – it was her job to see him. “Alvaro!” she began, but her voice faded as she looked closer. “You’re bleeding. What happened?”
“I went looking for a doctor.”
“Doctors are supposed to fix you when something happens.” She pushed him into a chair, poured rum on a clean rag and wiped the blood from his head, ignoring his wince as she rubbed alcohol into the cut. “What kind of doctor does that?”
“Not one you want to know,” he said. “Not one I’d want to know if I had a choice.” He pointed to the stage, where the band was finishing a fast zambo number that might have come straight from Lourenço Marques. “When does Luis get done?”
“Three more songs. Here, I’ll bring you some wine.” Amália pointed him to an empty corner table and, a few minutes later, brought a bottle of vinho verde.
Alvaro let the shadows and music surround him. The zambo song was followed by a slow, melancholy fado, with Luis’ Portuguese guitarist taking a turn at the microphone. After that, another zambo, and then a morna from Cape Verde that had been written for a woman’s voice but which Luis sang surprisingly well. The band took its bows, and Alvaro almost didn’t notice when Luis, evidently tipped off by Amália, came to sit beside him.
Alvaro poured a second glass from the bottle. “Who’s that?” he asked, motioning toward the singer who’d taken Luis’ place.
“Senegalese – here from Paris. The students like him.” Alvaro followed Luis’ eyes through cigarette smoke to the students at the front tables, most of them Portuguese and many of whom had rings from French or German universities. He’d spoken to a few of them on occasion; they always talked about how repressive and provincial the Novo Reino seemed after Paris and Berlin, and they liked hearing the music they’d come to know there.
Some of them were pounding on the tables. “Dias! Dias!” they shouted, and Alvaro realized that though the new singer was from Senegal, the theme of his song was Portuguese. “It is time for a new day to last forever, when all of us stand before God together…”
“Speaking of which,” Alvaro said to Luis in Chilunda, “I’ve got business from the kingdoms. A Yeke doctor in São Miguel – do you know him?” Luis was Lunda and a freethinker; muti wouldn’t scare him.
“The muti man,” Luis answered, and Alvaro exulted inwardly. “No, I haven’t seen him, but…”
“But what?” The Senegalese singer had launched into something loud, something called “The Knot,” and whatever Luis had said was too low to be heard.
“The knot, just like he said.” Luis was smiling at the coincidence. “I heard they brought him.”
Alvaro had never heard of anyone by that name, but there was something naggingly familiar about it. The singer had begun another verse in which the knot was drawn in light rather than tied, and suddenly he made the connection.
It wasn’t the song and it wasn’t the rope that Alvaro remembered – it was the tiles. He’d learned, years ago at the university, that many of the earliest Portuguese tiles followed a knotted pattern, and that the pattern had originally come from the Moors. And he knew who in the colonies had adopted that pattern as their own.
It was political after all.
#
“You told them,” Alvaro said to Manuel the next morning at the castle.
“I swear I didn’t. I asked around last night like I said, and I mentioned it to Dom Fernando. He’d want to know about something like that. He must have passed it on.”
“Fernando?” Alvaro repeated, but more in resignation than anger. He couldn’t fault Manuel for telling his patron; as he’d admitted himself the previous morning, without a patron you were nothing. “But why would he…”
“He’s the boss of Dias’ party in São Miguel,” Manuel said, obviously trying to think it through. Alvaro nodded; he already knew that much. Oddly enough, political parties operated more freely in the barracas than anywhere else in metropolitan Portugal; as far as the Novo Reino was concerned, the shantytowns didn’t exist, so it took much more to catch the censors’ attention. And whichever party controlled a barraca could recruit workers and collect tithes for its cause.
In other places, such control might be decided by elections, but in the barracas that would be a step too far even if the bosses were truly interested in them. Which most of them weren’t…
“He’s working with the Catholic Liberals now and against the separatists,” Manuel was saying. “The socialists are trying to stay out of the way, and I thought the Knot was too, but maybe they’ve worked something out with Dom Fernando, or they’re trying to.”
“Maybe. But why would they bring in a muti doctor from Yeke?”
“Dom Fernando didn’t tell me that. He didn’t tell me he knew the man at all.”
Alvaro got up from the wall and looked down at the city again. “Then I need to find out. The more this goes outside the barraca, the more trouble for all of us. I’m going - tell the foreman Major Ferreira will take care of him.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“I know,” Alvaro said, thinking of the stones left to add to the cathedral and how close it might be to tumbling down. “But I’m sick to death of being careful.”
#
The streets of the barracas, strangely enough, were wider than those of the Alfama or Pena. Roma people had camped at the edges of the city since time out of mind, but most of those who lived there today, barring a few bewildered Timorese, were from the African colonies, and by the time they came, motor-wagons had already been invented. So the houses of clapboard and corrugated metal, and the open sewers on each side of the streets, were set far enough apart for wagons to pass.
Alvaro counted himself fortunate never to have lived in a barraca – university students didn’t stay there, and even after he’d gone to prison, he’d had a job and a strong patron. But he’d been there before. Africans, especially those who had politics, could hardly avoid going to the barracas sometime; there were things that could only be said there and imports that were sold nowhere else. So when he got off the back of a delivery wagon and stepped carefully around the sewers and the piles of refuse, he knew where he was going.
This shebeen had no name and it was made of the same materials as the houses, but Alvaro could hear the music half a street away. It was a fado like none he’d heard before, as slow and mournful as any that were played in the sailors’ taverns but one that borrowed its rhythms from central Africa, and as he stepped inside, he saw that the singer was half Luba and half Roma. He was instantly sure that her parents’ families had disowned them, and he wondered how they’d even said enough to each other to decide to marry. He remembered his father and mother, and remembered that all things came from God.
He took a table by the door and called to the waiter. “Bring me a bottle of red wine,” he said, “and send someone to where the Belloists meet. Tell the boss I’ll wait for him here.”
“Dom Agostinho?” the waiter asked incredulously. “Are you crazy? No one just asks Dom Agostinho to come meet him.”
“I’m asking now.”
“And who the hell are you?”
“Tell him I’m coming from Police Major Ferreira – he’ll know I’m not lying. Tell him I’m here to stop trouble, not start it.”
“It’s your funeral.” The waiter opened the wine bottle and disappeared out a back door. Alvaro sat and drank and listened to the singer. She was good; she was haunting, she was better than this place. So many others also were. Stones for the cathedral.
Ten minutes later, Dom Agostinho came in.
He was from Mozambique, Alvaro could tell; from the north, where the coastal peoples had learned of Islam from the Yao. He was no Muslim, though; he wore a cross along with his knot. A Belloist Catholic – well, the Mozambicans were supposed to be the creative ones.
Alvaro took refuge once again in audacity. “I thought Belloists weren’t supposed to be political,” he said.
“Are we? We’re building a self-contained community here, all Africans together – separate from all the factions.” Alvaro was skeptical, but Dom Agostinho’s face grew animated as he explained, and it took him a second to realize that he was talking to the person who’d sent him a peremptory summons. He sat and poured himself a cup of wine. “Tell me,” he said, “why I shouldn’t leave your body somewhere on the hill.”
“Does Dom Fernando know you brought a muti doctor here?”
“Dom Fernando…”
“No? You held something back when you went to him for a deal? He does know now, and it’s a problem for you. Maybe I can stop that.”
“I can stop it myself. That’s not enough to let you walk out of here.”
“You brought him to do what – scare the separatists and the Catholic Liberals, make them come over and work for you? Very apolitical… but did you know that he’s seeing Portuguese women on the side?”
That finally made Agostinho put his glass down. “He’s doing what?”
“He’s selling muti to the Portuguese in Pena – maybe other parts of the city too. That’s why the major sent me here. Someone thinks her neighbor got witched by a Yeke doctor – the police come, the priests come, the mobs come, trouble for all of us. São Miguel has been burned out before. It can happen again, destroy everything you’re trying to build.”
“What do you care? You’re a separatist.”
Somehow, it didn’t surprise Alvaro that Dom Agostinho knew about him. “It will take all of us together to bring the Novo Reino down.”
“Maybe so.” Agostinho looked uncommonly thoughtful as he poured more wine. “The doctor – I never told him to go outside São Miguel. I’ll make sure he stays.”
“Major Ferreira will make sure. And me – do you know who my mother was?”
“Yes. That’s why you’ll go home tonight instead of the graveyard.” The Knot boss waved a hand at the singer in back of the shebeen. “Tell your major that if he wants to show his gratitude, he’ll get her a booking in the city. And you – don’t come back.”
“I hope I don’t have to.”
#
“I’m sorry,” Major Ferreira said. “I went to the university but I couldn’t do anything. They said you can’t go back – the order is from the government.”
“I didn’t think you could, Dom Vicente.”
“There will be something else. I pay my debts.”
Alvaro sat on a bench; they were in the same hillside park they’d been in two days before, and the smell of cooking drifted through the air as food-sellers set up for the morning. “There may be something else you can do,” he said. “Do you know any tilemakers?”
Whatever the major had expected Alvaro to say, it obviously wasn’t that. “Are you any good?”
Alvaro took his sketchbook out of his pocket and held it out silently. Ferreira flipped through it, and disbelief changed to… something else.
“I know someone in Bairro Alto,” he said slowly. “He has a small shop and his apprentice just left.”
“Does he like Angolans?”
“He’ll take you on if I tell him to.” Alvaro caught the silent warning: the rest would be up to him. A stone for the cathedral, maybe.
“It’ll pay less than you’re getting now at the castle,” the major continued.
“I can live with that.”
“Maybe you can. And I pay my debts. Go to work today and go to him tomorrow morning.”
The two men shook hands and Alvaro walked downhill toward home. They’d need everyone together to bring the Novo Reino down, he’d said; maybe the major could be part of that as well.
That was something he might learn tomorrow.
Kaiphranos
Donor
This reminds me of how much I've missed this timeline. Maybe I should go back and do a re-read at some point...
Thanks! Every now and then, there's another story to be told in this world.
Not quite so much "kinder and gentler" as "kicked in the head by reality a few more times," but yeah.
(And yes, I was in Portugal last week - why do you ask?)
Enjoyed having more pf this world fleshed out.
Speaking of Portugal and their recent Eurovision win, is there anything similar in the Malêverse?
Speaking of Portugal and their recent Eurovision win, is there anything similar in the Malêverse?
I hope so; I wonder what would the voting blocks be in the Malêverse...
An Afro-Atlantic "Eurovision" is a very plausible possibility, too; the countries of the Afro-Atlantic Common Market have a combined musical tradition that is impressive to say the least, and what better way to emphasize the cultural ties between the member states on both sides of the Atlantic than a campy musical competition?
I also wonder what the most popular sports are in the Malêverse: even though association football might still be the most popular sport there, I don't think it could ever be as dominant as in OTL; it's been already established that cricket is somewhat more widespread, but I wonder if there are other differences: most of OTL's popular team sports originated in the Anglosphere, for example, but since the UK and the US weren't as dominant in the Malêverse, maybe the most popular sport in Central and Northern Europe and in the former German colonial empire might be handball instead...? A variant of the jeu de paume might be quite popular in the Romance-speaking countries of Europe, South America and North Africa, too.
The earlier introduction of cars is one hell of a butterfly for motorsports, too.
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This story is complete, but maybe we'll see Alvaro at an earlier or later time in his life, either in Lisbon or back in Luanda (which is another city I'd like to explore more ITTL - some of the working-class neighborhoods in Lisbon IOTL were actually somewhat like I imagine Malêverse Luanda might be).
I hope so; I wonder what would the voting blocks be in the Malêverse...
An Afro-Atlantic "Eurovision" is a very plausible possibility, too; the countries of the Afro-Atlantic Common Market have a combined musical tradition that is impressive to say the least, and what better way to emphasize the cultural ties between the member states on both sides of the Atlantic than a campy musical competition?
At a guess, Eurovision-type contests ITTL might actually start with the Afro-Atlantic Common Market. Masquerades are traditional in both West Africa and the New World African communities - Mmanwu and Egungun in Nigeria, for instance, and Junkanoo or Carnival in the Caribbean - so a televised competition combining masquerade and popular music would be a natural part of the Afro-Atlantists' culture-building program. TTL's version of Eurovision might be inspired by the Afro-Atlantic contest... which could result in it not being that much different from OTL. (Sorry, the Malêverse isn't a utopia.)
Portugal would of course be part of both - maybe France too - and there would be many and loud disagreements regarding whether entry should be restricted to state-level entities or whether autonomous regions, cities and cultural collectives should be able to compete.
More widespread (and more varied) handball, or other court games like jai alai, might be interesting - maybe the higher-profile Native American movement could also lead to lacrosse being played more widely. I also remember mentioning rugby, particularly in the Melanesian societies where sevens are a big deal IOTL.
Jeez, this story has been one fantastic read over the past week or so. Great work, all around.
Glad you liked it! Any particular favorites, either as to themes/arcs or individual updates?
Got a few good ones. For starters, Teddy verbally beating Wilson's little debate is a personal favorite.
Secondly, I'd have to say The Great War was a really good arc altogether.
As was Africa turning out far better then OTL, which ain't really saying much, but I digress.
Hey there Jonathan. I've been researching a bit on animal domestication in West Africa and, to my surprise, I found a cattle species that is not only tolerant of the livestock-killing tsetse fly, but also do well in the tropical/dry climate of the region: the N'Dama cattle. The only problems seems to be it's 20% young mortality rate and low rate of growth among surviving calfs.
I wonder... given the further advancement of Senegal and West Africa ITTL, would there be a wider interest in N'dama domestication with more survivability and viability? The species is able to be selectively bred to increase size and muscle mass, so a variant cattle subgroup with water-buffalo-like tilling power could be an incredible agent for change in West African agriculture, especially in places like Sokoto and Ilorin.
I wonder... given the further advancement of Senegal and West Africa ITTL, would there be a wider interest in N'dama domestication with more survivability and viability? The species is able to be selectively bred to increase size and muscle mass, so a variant cattle subgroup with water-buffalo-like tilling power could be an incredible agent for change in West African agriculture, especially in places like Sokoto and Ilorin.
Kaiphranos
Donor
If I'm remembering correctly, some of the first educational institutions that get set up are focused on agriculture. This certainly seems like the kind of thing their researchers would be interested in...
Fascinating stuff. The N'Dama breed is fairly widespread IOTL, and in Senegal, where they make up about 30 percent of the herds, there have been natural crosses with zebu. Possibly the agricultural school in Ilorin - which, as Kaiphranos mentioned, was founded by Usman Abacar during the 19th century - might experiment with N'Dama-zebu crosses to produce something like the Senepol, which IOTL was developed in the West Indies during the 20th century and retains the N'Dama immune advantages while being heavier and having lower mortality. They might also try crosses with other breeds of African cattle or selective breeding among N'Dama purebreds - TTL's Ilorin agricultural institute during its early days was very much in favor of the "try everything and see what works" approach.
By the Water, part 1 of 2
Kampala, 1903-04
In the mornings, Rózsa swept up at Kovacs’ bakery next to the Nakawa synagogue; in the afternoons, she cleaned and carried for Musoke the carpenter by Nsambya hill; at evening she helped her Aunt Gitta with the laundry they took in. At night she went down to the docks and played the flute.
Aunt Gitta didn’t want her to: there was always more to do at the house. But playing the flute by the water was the only thing Rózsa had left from the old country. Before the world had erupted in war, before Hungary had torn itself apart, she’d taken the flute her father had bought her and practiced in a park by the Bega. Sometimes her mother and sister came and listened.
Her father was dead in the great war, her mother and sister in the civil war. The park on the Bega was rubble along with much of the rest of Temesvár. But Rózsa still had the flute.
She played Hungarian dances and Yiddish laments. Sometimes she played Aunt Gitta’s favorite songs, though her aunt wasn’t there. Sometimes she played her mother’s. And as she learned which ones the fishermen at the harbor liked best, she played them too.
It seemed that every week or so, another fisherman would stop to listen for a while before he took his dory out for the night. One of them, a captain named Mayanga with a crew of three, stopped by almost every day, clapping his hands and doing his best to sing in Hungarian. That only added to the others’ merriment, but when he came back the next day, he’d always learned another word from one of his customers.
“Come back in the morning before you go to work,” he said one day. “I’ll give you some fish to bring to your family.”
Rózsa understood only some of that. She knew he was speaking Luganda – she’d been in Kampala long enough that she could tell the Luganda that people used in conversation from the Swahili used for trade – but thus far she’d learned enough of it to do her job and not much more. But she recognized “give,” “fish” and “family,” and when she returned to the beach at sunrise, Mayanga clapped again and handed her a couple of fat catfish.
There were two more the day after, and after that, Aunt Gitta no longer complained.
On another day, one of Mayanga’s crew brought a drum – “my little brother’s,” he said, and this time Rózsa understood – and he sang a fishing song, a praise-song to Mukasa of the Lake and his bounty. “Can you play this?” he asked, and at the second verse, Rózsa raised her flute and joined him.
Their boat came back the next morning full of fish. “Good luck,” Mayanga said, and gave her three.
There were other songs they sang at the harbor and in the city, and Rózsa began to notice them. She would hear them making deliveries for Kovacs or listening to Musoke’s men at their work, and she committed them to memory, beating time when she thought no one was looking, imagining fingerings on an invisible instrument. She played sometimes at the carpenters’ workshop now, and she sang to give herself comfort while helping Aunt Gitta with the washing.
And one day, a courtier in a flame-red kanzu came to summon her to play for the king.
Kampala was built on seven hills; six of them were crowded with shrines and marketplaces and the houses of the rich, but on Mengo Hill there was only the Lubiri. The great palisaded enclosure loomed over Rózsa as she followed the courtier through winding streets of thatched roundhouses and workshops, and it loomed larger as they climbed the straight royal road to the palace gate.
Inside, past the ceremonial guards with decidedly unceremonial Enfield rifles, was a city within the city: storehouses and outbuildings, gardens and fields, all centered on the great house at the summit. Even to Rózsa’s untrained eye, the palace was new: it was a low, two-story adobe building constructed in the Zanzibari style, as unlike the traditional outbuildings as Rabbi Kasztner’s new synagogue in Nakawa was to his old one in Budapest. It was there, in silence, that the courtier led, and it was there that Rózsa followed.
The throne room occupied nearly all the first story, and there was no mistaking who the king was. Kayondo, thirty-third Kabaka of Buganda, wore a broad turban and a blue embroidered robe over his kanzu, and he sat on a carved wooden throne flanked by his two wives. He was nearing fifty if not past it, and as Rózsa made her obeisance, his face betrayed a humor that contrasted with the setting.
To his right, Rózsa saw, was the Lukiiko, the privy council: the government ministers, rural chiefs and military commanders who had always been a part of it, and the rich merchants and educated civil servants who had come to it in the past twenty years. The council had been in session – the papers scattered across the mat made that clear – but now they were busy with cups of banana beer and bowls of ugali and chicken in a sauce of groundnuts and sesame, and they were listening to the royal musicians’ praise-song.
That, finally, was what dragged Rózsa’s attention from the scene before her. She had heard many of the common Luganda songs by now, but none of the courtly sort, and the entertainers at the king’s left hand were an orchestra like none in Hungary. There was a wooden amadinda xylophone with three players, each playing his own interweaving melody; there were lyres and eight-stringed ennanga harps; there were wooden pipes and four kinds of drums.
The song was about a battle; Rózsa could tell that much. Her Luganda was better now than when she’d first started playing music at the harbor, but the lyrics were archaic and they were sung in a poetic meter she didn’t recognize. The battle had been fought at a place called Nsiisi, and there an ancient Kabaka had overcome Buganda’s enemies; she strained to understand the details, and it came as a shock when the song suddenly ended and Kayondo spoke to her.
“Bárányi Rózsa nnyabo,” the king said. “They say you have a kind of flute we haven’t seen, and that you play it well. Play for us.”
“What song, your Majesty?”
“You told me – what is its name?” said Kayondo, looking to his right at the only white man in the Lukiiko. Rózsa knew who that was – all the Hungarians knew who Colonel Weisz was. He’d finished his six years of service in the Kabaka’s army, but he still advised the king on military matters just as Nagy the Magyarab had become minister of trade.
“It’s called ‘The Rooster is Crowing,’ your Majesty.”
Kayondo laughed. “We have many roosters that crow here. Do you know how they crow in the Magyar lands, Rózsa?”
She did. Every Hungarian Jew did. She took her flute out of its case – the metal instrument itself caused no small amount of fascination among the assembled Baganda – and began to play. It was set to a Transylvanian folk melody, but the Kaliver Rebbe who’d written the lyrics had slowed it to a pace suited for reflection and prayer – or for a royal court. Why has the Messiah not come? the song asked, and it answered, we have been exiled from our country for our sins. And Rózsa, who had come in exile even to Buganda, had no better answer than that.
Colonel Weisz, who had heard the song before, had a strange look in his eyes when it finished, and the other courtiers applauded and cheered. Rózsa wondered what to say now, but the decision was taken from her when the musicians resumed playing. “Akasozi Baamunaanika,” this one was called – the Baamunaanika hill – but it was a song in praise of the king. “Since I have entered his service, I have never eaten food without sauce,” the singers chanted, and the melodies of the amadinda and the harp wove around them.
The cool metal of the flute remained in Rózsa’s hand, and without thinking, she raised it to her lips and played again. There was something unusual about the melodic line, something that made it difficult to improvise a harmony, but she went where the music took her. Some of the courtiers joined in with clapping hands and stamping feet, and for the first time, she noticed a man in his twenties in a plain white kanzu, sitting cross-legged behind the musicians and watching her keenly.
That song, too, came to a close. For a second there was silence, and Rózsa wondered if she had done something wrong: she’d heard that some songs were sacred among the Buganda, and that some were for women while others were only for men. But a moment later, Kayondo smiled broadly.
“So, Rózsa, you have seen my bakazannyirizi – do you want to be one of them?”
Now, she was speechless in a different way. “I have to work at the bakery,” she said, stalling, “and at Musoke’s wood-shop…”
“Didn’t you hear the song?” The king was laughing. “Those who serve me never eat food without sauce. I will pay you better than Kovacs does, I can assure you.”
Aunt Gitta would want her to take the job, Rózsa knew, and she nodded slowly.
“Good! The music-master can show you the storerooms.” He looked sharply to his left. “Senyange!” he called, and the young man who Rózsa had noticed before rose smoothly from where he sat.
“Come with me,” he said in quite passable Yiddish, and turned to the door without another word.
“Where did you learn that language?” she asked when they were finally in the storehouse where the instruments were kept.
“Colonel Weisz showed me,” Senyange answered. “I can use it to trade with the Germans. They make very good instruments in Germany.” He laughed, and his smile was infectious.
“Do you know Hungarian too?”
“A word here, a word there,” he said in that language, and then switched back to Luganda. “Mmanyi kaseera Magyar.”
Rózsa smiled again – she wondered if it was the first time since the wars began that she’d smiled twice in one day – and her eyes wandered to a stack of parchments that shared a table with the harps. “Is this music?” she asked.
“Oh, yes.” Senyange picked up the top sheet and turned it over so she could see. “These are our notes. You divide the octave into seven parts, but we divide it into five.”
So that was what had seemed strange about the court musicians’ songs. She raised her flute and imagined fingerings that might make those notes, and at Senyange’s nod, she tried them.
“Our forms aren’t hard once you get to know them.” He began to explain the amadinda melodies, the interlocking lines played by the stickmen, the series of subtly different repetitions in multiples of twelve. “And you have to fit the music to the words – you know that in Luganda, the tone is part of the meaning?”
“Yes,” she said uncertainly. She did know that Luganda was tonal, but that was one of the things about it that was most alien to the languages she knew, and she still found it difficult.
“So for a rising tone, you need a rising note.” He trailed off, seeing that she was still unsure, and searched through his pack for another paper. “Like this,” he said, and her eyes barely registered that the words on the paper were Hebrew. “The trope notes – each of them is a different tone, and all the tones together make the song…”
She heard him, and then the letters on the page did register. “That’s Hebrew!” she said. “Where did you get it?”
“At the synagogue, of course. I am a Jew.”
There was a stool near where Rózsa was standing, and she sank into it gratefully. There was not a trace of anything she recognized as Jewish in Senyange’s face: his skin was smooth and dark brown, his features broad, his hair cropped close. “Ethiopia,” she said, grasping at straws – there were Jews in Ethiopia, so she’d heard. “Did you come from Gondar?”
“No – I am Muganda, and my ancestors for a hundred generations are Baganda.” His eyes were merry and she could see he was tempted to leave it at that, but he took pity on her. “My father was minister of finance to Kabaka Mutesa. When the king joined all the religions in order to end the religious fighting, my father was one of those who became Jewish to give him a quorum when he prayed as a Jew. There are many of us now.”
Suddenly she remembered – yes, she had heard of the Buganda Jews. The Hungarians had kept apart from them, but they heard things and they talked. Colonel Weisz had even married one, hadn’t he?
“Yes he did,” Senyange said, and Rózsa realized she had spoken out loud. She flushed in embarrassment, suddenly wondering what the Baganda Jews might think of the foreign Jews who hadn’t sought them out.
“Did it work?” she asked hastily. “Ending the religious fighting, I mean.”
“The fighting only started again after Mutesa died, and now Kabaka Kayondo is doing the same thing, so judge for yourself.” Senyange clasped his hands behind his back as another thought occurred to him and crossed the room to a window. Rózsa looked past him and saw that the window looked out on a small man-made pond: that it was, in fact, by the water.
“It’s Shabbat tonight. Come to our synagogue. You can play your song there.”
“There’s music in the synagogue?” No synagogue Rózsa knew had instrumental music, though she’d heard that some of the German ones had organs.
“Oh,” Senyange said, and he drew the word out long with laughter. “Come and you’ll see.”
And she did. There were drums at the synagogue on the slopes of Nakasero hill. There were lyres. There were ram’s horns. There was dancing when the Torah was removed from its hardwood ark and carried seven times around the congregation. And when Rózsa played “The Rooster is Crowing” again to Jews who had never known exile, there were, on more than one face, tears.
They feasted afterward in the synagogue gardens, and Senyange brought her to the elders’ mat where Colonel Weisz and his wife Miriam Kabonesa sat with the rabbi and the senior men and matrons. “I hope we see you again,” Miriam Kabonesa said – she was bold for a Muganda woman. “When András wrote to your rabbi and said that Jews were welcome here, he meant it.”
“There may be different opinions about what ‘here’ means,” Weisz answered; his voice was sardonic, and Rózsa caught the edge of what he meant but wasn’t sure of the center. “But I also hope we see you again.”
Sometimes they did. Sometimes Rózsa still went with Aunt Gitta to Rabbi Kasztner’s synagogue, but on other days she accompanied Senyange to Nakasero. It seemed, in fact, that she accompanied the young music master quite often; on some occasions, as when the royal musicians played before the court, his presence was silent, but when they rehearsed and composed new songs, the room was filled with conversation. Sometimes, she stayed to finish a song after the others had gone home, and they would talk for hours in Luganda and Yiddish and something that resembled Hungarian, conversations that ranged across Europe and Africa and four thousand years of history.
In time, she learned that others also talked, and that she and Senyange were the subject.
Kintu and Nambi by Gloria Ssali
#
In the mornings, Rózsa swept up at Kovacs’ bakery next to the Nakawa synagogue; in the afternoons, she cleaned and carried for Musoke the carpenter by Nsambya hill; at evening she helped her Aunt Gitta with the laundry they took in. At night she went down to the docks and played the flute.
Aunt Gitta didn’t want her to: there was always more to do at the house. But playing the flute by the water was the only thing Rózsa had left from the old country. Before the world had erupted in war, before Hungary had torn itself apart, she’d taken the flute her father had bought her and practiced in a park by the Bega. Sometimes her mother and sister came and listened.
Her father was dead in the great war, her mother and sister in the civil war. The park on the Bega was rubble along with much of the rest of Temesvár. But Rózsa still had the flute.
She played Hungarian dances and Yiddish laments. Sometimes she played Aunt Gitta’s favorite songs, though her aunt wasn’t there. Sometimes she played her mother’s. And as she learned which ones the fishermen at the harbor liked best, she played them too.
It seemed that every week or so, another fisherman would stop to listen for a while before he took his dory out for the night. One of them, a captain named Mayanga with a crew of three, stopped by almost every day, clapping his hands and doing his best to sing in Hungarian. That only added to the others’ merriment, but when he came back the next day, he’d always learned another word from one of his customers.
“Come back in the morning before you go to work,” he said one day. “I’ll give you some fish to bring to your family.”
Rózsa understood only some of that. She knew he was speaking Luganda – she’d been in Kampala long enough that she could tell the Luganda that people used in conversation from the Swahili used for trade – but thus far she’d learned enough of it to do her job and not much more. But she recognized “give,” “fish” and “family,” and when she returned to the beach at sunrise, Mayanga clapped again and handed her a couple of fat catfish.
There were two more the day after, and after that, Aunt Gitta no longer complained.
On another day, one of Mayanga’s crew brought a drum – “my little brother’s,” he said, and this time Rózsa understood – and he sang a fishing song, a praise-song to Mukasa of the Lake and his bounty. “Can you play this?” he asked, and at the second verse, Rózsa raised her flute and joined him.
Their boat came back the next morning full of fish. “Good luck,” Mayanga said, and gave her three.
There were other songs they sang at the harbor and in the city, and Rózsa began to notice them. She would hear them making deliveries for Kovacs or listening to Musoke’s men at their work, and she committed them to memory, beating time when she thought no one was looking, imagining fingerings on an invisible instrument. She played sometimes at the carpenters’ workshop now, and she sang to give herself comfort while helping Aunt Gitta with the washing.
And one day, a courtier in a flame-red kanzu came to summon her to play for the king.
#
Kampala was built on seven hills; six of them were crowded with shrines and marketplaces and the houses of the rich, but on Mengo Hill there was only the Lubiri. The great palisaded enclosure loomed over Rózsa as she followed the courtier through winding streets of thatched roundhouses and workshops, and it loomed larger as they climbed the straight royal road to the palace gate.
Inside, past the ceremonial guards with decidedly unceremonial Enfield rifles, was a city within the city: storehouses and outbuildings, gardens and fields, all centered on the great house at the summit. Even to Rózsa’s untrained eye, the palace was new: it was a low, two-story adobe building constructed in the Zanzibari style, as unlike the traditional outbuildings as Rabbi Kasztner’s new synagogue in Nakawa was to his old one in Budapest. It was there, in silence, that the courtier led, and it was there that Rózsa followed.
The throne room occupied nearly all the first story, and there was no mistaking who the king was. Kayondo, thirty-third Kabaka of Buganda, wore a broad turban and a blue embroidered robe over his kanzu, and he sat on a carved wooden throne flanked by his two wives. He was nearing fifty if not past it, and as Rózsa made her obeisance, his face betrayed a humor that contrasted with the setting.
To his right, Rózsa saw, was the Lukiiko, the privy council: the government ministers, rural chiefs and military commanders who had always been a part of it, and the rich merchants and educated civil servants who had come to it in the past twenty years. The council had been in session – the papers scattered across the mat made that clear – but now they were busy with cups of banana beer and bowls of ugali and chicken in a sauce of groundnuts and sesame, and they were listening to the royal musicians’ praise-song.
That, finally, was what dragged Rózsa’s attention from the scene before her. She had heard many of the common Luganda songs by now, but none of the courtly sort, and the entertainers at the king’s left hand were an orchestra like none in Hungary. There was a wooden amadinda xylophone with three players, each playing his own interweaving melody; there were lyres and eight-stringed ennanga harps; there were wooden pipes and four kinds of drums.
The song was about a battle; Rózsa could tell that much. Her Luganda was better now than when she’d first started playing music at the harbor, but the lyrics were archaic and they were sung in a poetic meter she didn’t recognize. The battle had been fought at a place called Nsiisi, and there an ancient Kabaka had overcome Buganda’s enemies; she strained to understand the details, and it came as a shock when the song suddenly ended and Kayondo spoke to her.
“Bárányi Rózsa nnyabo,” the king said. “They say you have a kind of flute we haven’t seen, and that you play it well. Play for us.”
“What song, your Majesty?”
“You told me – what is its name?” said Kayondo, looking to his right at the only white man in the Lukiiko. Rózsa knew who that was – all the Hungarians knew who Colonel Weisz was. He’d finished his six years of service in the Kabaka’s army, but he still advised the king on military matters just as Nagy the Magyarab had become minister of trade.
“It’s called ‘The Rooster is Crowing,’ your Majesty.”
Kayondo laughed. “We have many roosters that crow here. Do you know how they crow in the Magyar lands, Rózsa?”
She did. Every Hungarian Jew did. She took her flute out of its case – the metal instrument itself caused no small amount of fascination among the assembled Baganda – and began to play. It was set to a Transylvanian folk melody, but the Kaliver Rebbe who’d written the lyrics had slowed it to a pace suited for reflection and prayer – or for a royal court. Why has the Messiah not come? the song asked, and it answered, we have been exiled from our country for our sins. And Rózsa, who had come in exile even to Buganda, had no better answer than that.
Colonel Weisz, who had heard the song before, had a strange look in his eyes when it finished, and the other courtiers applauded and cheered. Rózsa wondered what to say now, but the decision was taken from her when the musicians resumed playing. “Akasozi Baamunaanika,” this one was called – the Baamunaanika hill – but it was a song in praise of the king. “Since I have entered his service, I have never eaten food without sauce,” the singers chanted, and the melodies of the amadinda and the harp wove around them.
The cool metal of the flute remained in Rózsa’s hand, and without thinking, she raised it to her lips and played again. There was something unusual about the melodic line, something that made it difficult to improvise a harmony, but she went where the music took her. Some of the courtiers joined in with clapping hands and stamping feet, and for the first time, she noticed a man in his twenties in a plain white kanzu, sitting cross-legged behind the musicians and watching her keenly.
That song, too, came to a close. For a second there was silence, and Rózsa wondered if she had done something wrong: she’d heard that some songs were sacred among the Buganda, and that some were for women while others were only for men. But a moment later, Kayondo smiled broadly.
“So, Rózsa, you have seen my bakazannyirizi – do you want to be one of them?”
Now, she was speechless in a different way. “I have to work at the bakery,” she said, stalling, “and at Musoke’s wood-shop…”
“Didn’t you hear the song?” The king was laughing. “Those who serve me never eat food without sauce. I will pay you better than Kovacs does, I can assure you.”
Aunt Gitta would want her to take the job, Rózsa knew, and she nodded slowly.
“Good! The music-master can show you the storerooms.” He looked sharply to his left. “Senyange!” he called, and the young man who Rózsa had noticed before rose smoothly from where he sat.
“Come with me,” he said in quite passable Yiddish, and turned to the door without another word.
#
“Where did you learn that language?” she asked when they were finally in the storehouse where the instruments were kept.
“Colonel Weisz showed me,” Senyange answered. “I can use it to trade with the Germans. They make very good instruments in Germany.” He laughed, and his smile was infectious.
“Do you know Hungarian too?”
“A word here, a word there,” he said in that language, and then switched back to Luganda. “Mmanyi kaseera Magyar.”
Rózsa smiled again – she wondered if it was the first time since the wars began that she’d smiled twice in one day – and her eyes wandered to a stack of parchments that shared a table with the harps. “Is this music?” she asked.
“Oh, yes.” Senyange picked up the top sheet and turned it over so she could see. “These are our notes. You divide the octave into seven parts, but we divide it into five.”
So that was what had seemed strange about the court musicians’ songs. She raised her flute and imagined fingerings that might make those notes, and at Senyange’s nod, she tried them.
“Our forms aren’t hard once you get to know them.” He began to explain the amadinda melodies, the interlocking lines played by the stickmen, the series of subtly different repetitions in multiples of twelve. “And you have to fit the music to the words – you know that in Luganda, the tone is part of the meaning?”
“Yes,” she said uncertainly. She did know that Luganda was tonal, but that was one of the things about it that was most alien to the languages she knew, and she still found it difficult.
“So for a rising tone, you need a rising note.” He trailed off, seeing that she was still unsure, and searched through his pack for another paper. “Like this,” he said, and her eyes barely registered that the words on the paper were Hebrew. “The trope notes – each of them is a different tone, and all the tones together make the song…”
She heard him, and then the letters on the page did register. “That’s Hebrew!” she said. “Where did you get it?”
“At the synagogue, of course. I am a Jew.”
There was a stool near where Rózsa was standing, and she sank into it gratefully. There was not a trace of anything she recognized as Jewish in Senyange’s face: his skin was smooth and dark brown, his features broad, his hair cropped close. “Ethiopia,” she said, grasping at straws – there were Jews in Ethiopia, so she’d heard. “Did you come from Gondar?”
“No – I am Muganda, and my ancestors for a hundred generations are Baganda.” His eyes were merry and she could see he was tempted to leave it at that, but he took pity on her. “My father was minister of finance to Kabaka Mutesa. When the king joined all the religions in order to end the religious fighting, my father was one of those who became Jewish to give him a quorum when he prayed as a Jew. There are many of us now.”
Suddenly she remembered – yes, she had heard of the Buganda Jews. The Hungarians had kept apart from them, but they heard things and they talked. Colonel Weisz had even married one, hadn’t he?
“Yes he did,” Senyange said, and Rózsa realized she had spoken out loud. She flushed in embarrassment, suddenly wondering what the Baganda Jews might think of the foreign Jews who hadn’t sought them out.
“Did it work?” she asked hastily. “Ending the religious fighting, I mean.”
“The fighting only started again after Mutesa died, and now Kabaka Kayondo is doing the same thing, so judge for yourself.” Senyange clasped his hands behind his back as another thought occurred to him and crossed the room to a window. Rózsa looked past him and saw that the window looked out on a small man-made pond: that it was, in fact, by the water.
“It’s Shabbat tonight. Come to our synagogue. You can play your song there.”
“There’s music in the synagogue?” No synagogue Rózsa knew had instrumental music, though she’d heard that some of the German ones had organs.
“Oh,” Senyange said, and he drew the word out long with laughter. “Come and you’ll see.”
And she did. There were drums at the synagogue on the slopes of Nakasero hill. There were lyres. There were ram’s horns. There was dancing when the Torah was removed from its hardwood ark and carried seven times around the congregation. And when Rózsa played “The Rooster is Crowing” again to Jews who had never known exile, there were, on more than one face, tears.
They feasted afterward in the synagogue gardens, and Senyange brought her to the elders’ mat where Colonel Weisz and his wife Miriam Kabonesa sat with the rabbi and the senior men and matrons. “I hope we see you again,” Miriam Kabonesa said – she was bold for a Muganda woman. “When András wrote to your rabbi and said that Jews were welcome here, he meant it.”
“There may be different opinions about what ‘here’ means,” Weisz answered; his voice was sardonic, and Rózsa caught the edge of what he meant but wasn’t sure of the center. “But I also hope we see you again.”
Sometimes they did. Sometimes Rózsa still went with Aunt Gitta to Rabbi Kasztner’s synagogue, but on other days she accompanied Senyange to Nakasero. It seemed, in fact, that she accompanied the young music master quite often; on some occasions, as when the royal musicians played before the court, his presence was silent, but when they rehearsed and composed new songs, the room was filled with conversation. Sometimes, she stayed to finish a song after the others had gone home, and they would talk for hours in Luganda and Yiddish and something that resembled Hungarian, conversations that ranged across Europe and Africa and four thousand years of history.
In time, she learned that others also talked, and that she and Senyange were the subject.
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