Blood Is Dirt by Robert Wilson Read Free Book Online

picked up some sandwiches at La Gerbe d’Or patisserie and drove thirty kilometres east, nose to tail with a thirty-five-ton
Titan,
to the Benin capital Porto Novo, for our meeting with Heike’s boss.
    We parked in the agency’s compound, empty except for Heike’s Pathfinder and a Land Cruiser, just before 2 p.m. I broke the silence by asking Bagado if he’d mind me doing the talking during the meeting.
    â€˜White man to white man, you mean?’
    â€˜No, it’s just that we have a habit of shouting each other down. I think it’d look better if one of us took control to start with until the meeting turns into a free-for-all. I’m volunteering.’
    â€˜Or insisting?’
    â€˜No. I like to talk. You’re a good listener.’
    â€˜This isn’t what you British would call excluding me in? I’ve been in those meetings before. Token nigger in the corner whose word and opinion doesn’t count.’
    We stopped in the car park and faced off.
    â€˜What’s brought this on?’ I asked. ‘Since when have you been or felt excluded?’
    â€˜I didn’t like the way you assumed to be boss.’
    â€˜I have
not
assumed that. You want to control the meeting, that’s fine.’
    Bagado shook his head. He put his hands in his mac pockets and slumped. He didn’t like himself for some reason.
    â€˜What’s going on, Bagado?’ I asked, putting a hand on his shoulder. ‘Bondougou said something to you?’
    â€˜Let’s do this meeting,’ he said, morose, looking at the dust on his shoes. ‘You do the talking. You’re right. I’m a listener. I listen too much.’
    Gerhard’s office was as large and cool as Gerhard Lehrner himself. The man had all his blond hair on his head and all of his stomach behind his belt, even though Heike had told me he was on the nearside of fifty and had lost one wife to Africa—not killed, just couldn’t take it. He disposed of most preconceptions Englishmen drag up when they hear they’re about to meet a German. He had blue eyes in an uncreased face and a soft, full-lipped mouth which made him look kind to strangers, especially if they were women. He was courteous. He called me by my Christian name. He sat on the front edge of his desk so there were no barriers between us and revealed that he wasn’t wearing any socks under his brown loafers. He spoke perfect English and didn’t sound as if he was keen on extracting something without anaesthetic.
    Heike wasn’t in on the meeting, otherwise I might have had to disguise the fact that Gerhard didn’t strike me as a bad guy at all. This, despite the fact that his first question was not one you’d come across in Trivial Pursuit.
    â€˜What can you tell me about the Yoruba god, Orishala?’
    Bagado smiled benignly and looked at me as if I’d recently vacated the Yoruba mythology chair at Lagos University. I waved him through.
    â€˜Orishala,’ said Bagado, slitting his eyes, looking through the thin Venetian blinds of the window for inspiration and starting to sound like a lecturer with a roomful of captured arseholes to talk to, ‘is the creator god of the Yoruba. He’s not the supreme god. That is Olorun, “owner of the sky” and creator and judge of man. But the two are connected. In the beginning Olorun gave Orishala the task of creating firm ground out of the water and marsh that existed all around. To do this Orishala was given a pigeon, a hen and a snail shell full of earth. Orishala emptied the snail shell and the two birds scratched around and spread the earth over the marsh so that it became dry land.
    â€˜Later on, Orishala made plants and people but, this is the important bit, he could only
shape
people. Olorun being the supreme god was the only one who could invest them with life. Orishala wanted to know how Olorun did this, but whenever he spied on him, Olorun would