The White Mary by Kira Salak

Author:Kira Salak [Salak, Kira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2018-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Marika is sure of one thing: if Robert Lewis is really alive and out here somewhere, he doesn’t want to be found. He lost himself in the middle of this country. He cut himself a tunnel through this incredible mass of tangled, inhospitable green. The jungle wouldn’t have expected him to return. It would have reached out, grasped, planted its seed. It would have filled his path with new brush, barring escape.

Tobo and Marika don’t walk. They climb—over trees, under them. They plunge—through brackish black mud up to their waists. For a week, Tobo leads her through swampy valleys, the heat and humidity assailing her. She worries constantly about dehydration and heat exhaustion, her head pounding desperately.

As they reach the high mountains, the rain starts. Marika has never been pummeled by such storms; one of Tobo’s gods might be trying to drown out the earth. The jungle quickly floods, and Tobo tells her they’ll have to start climbing. She wonders if he’s serious—the mountains rise sharply at near ninety-degree angles and seem almost impossible to scale—but he starts pulling himself up the nearest slope using tree roots and vines, digging his toes into the muddy slopes. Marika follows as best she can, the rain loosening the soil beneath her feet. She barely makes any progress before she falls down the muddy mountainside to where she started. Tobo climbs down to get her, helping, encouraging, though his own weariness shows in his eyes. He knows there will be weeks of this sort of travel, made all the longer by the white mary’s lack of skills.

Tobo goes more slowly for her, so she can get the hang of it and learn how to place her feet properly. For a woman, at least she’s not as weak as he originally feared. Her body is surprisingly strong and can get her over the mountains. It’s only in her head that she’s unfit, blind to what’s before her, deaf to the sounds and speech of the jungle. She doesn’t know what to touch yet. What to hold or eat. He must teach her as if she were a child, telling her what everything is, showing her how to master the jungle and earn its respect. Tobo finds it all tedious, and misses his Anasi village, his children, his wives. If only, he thinks, he’d never run into that humbug Baku man.

They take the mountains one at a time. It’s slow going at first, until Marika finally learns what to do. She becomes adept at finding footholds and handholds. She stops moving clumsily through the brush. As she keeps up with Tobo, she grows used to the omnipresent sight of his sweaty black back and the dried tanket leaves covering his buttocks. It isn’t long before she loses track of the days. Time doesn’t matter, just the awareness of when night is coming, and so the opportunity to rest. Not even the mosquitoes bother her anymore. She sleeps like a dead person, without dreams, the rancid

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