Jean in Sokode

We had heard that the president was on a tour of the country, a short, three-day trip that would take him from Lomé, the capital in the south, to Dapaong, the capital of the northernmost Savanes region, though not the northernmost city. My village was on the roadside, and we could have seen him easily from the small boutique where I drank at night with the old farmers, tobacco-stained men in sandals made from old truck tires, carrying around their radios in the dark. We decided, though, to go up to Sokodé, the capital of our Centrale region, thirty-six kilometers to the north. There was a nice bar there along the road, and if we staked out the day there we could eat and drink and most definitely see him.

We left my village early, while the sounds of small brooms sweeping the dirt were still loud in the air. As the driver pulled into Sokodé we could see groups of red-bereted soldiers on the side streets, not directing traffic, but diverting it by their presence. The driver let us off near the market, and we walked up the road to the bar.

The sun was higher now, and the heat of the day established. All my days in Africa have been hot, the state of the heat monotonous, its intricacies describable with only a handful of adjectives. Muggy, dry, or blazing, it is always hot. Only during and for a few hours after heavy rains will it cool down enough to put on a sweater, or zip up a jacket.

The bar ladies were still sweeping out the porch when we got there, but the door was open and the tables set up. Two grills, each made from a half of a fifty-five gallon drum, stood at opposite ends of the bar’s porch. Both grills made the same things, roasted chickens and beef kebabs, but I preferred the meat from the grill on the southern end. The cooks arrived. The older one, who wore lopsided glasses and a dirty wool snow cap of indeterminate original color, established himself in the small enclave between the bar and a phone cabine, to start killing and gutting chickens. The other, a slim, smooth-headed younger man, lit the coals and began slicing the beef into ribbons and skewering it.

We sat down at my normal table in the lower corner near the meat men, and arranged the chairs so we were both sitting against the wall of the bar, watching the road. Across the street the breakfast ladies were scraping the bottoms of their large marmites for the last of the rice and beans they dished out in the mornings. One of the waitresses, a tall, flat-faced woman with her baby wrapped to her back, was finishing off a hunk of fish under the breakfast ladies’ small lean-to. The other waitress, her hair in a kinky ponytail, brought us two beers without being asked, and we began our stay.

We were hardly halfway through our bottles when a man I know, a French expatriate living in the city, rode up on a moto taxi. Jean is a tall and skinny man from the Basque region, with thick, curved glasses, and a lanky shock of greasy, sun-filtered hair. He raised his hand to greet us, and then shouted one of only two English phrases he claims to know, “Oh my God!” He pulled up another plastic chair and sat down with us.

Jean has been living in Togo for twenty years. I go to his house sometimes, in the Lohso neighborhood, and we sit on his porch drinking whiskey while his Togolese wife brings me pictures of them taken in the bar they used to own in Lomé. He was handsome when he was younger, but now, at the age of thirty-six, the African sun has dried and darkened his skin so that he looks eternally as though he’s just gotten out from under a car and has not yet taken a shower.

The waitress brought him a beer, and he plied fifty francs in her hand and sent her to a small stand down the street to buy him cigarettes. It was around nine-thirty now, and the walking vendors were out, trying to sell us watches or screwdrivers or DVDs. It is always a pleasure to watch Jean with the vendors. He has both the arrogant knowledge of an expat that this is not his only home, as well as the experience of someone who has spent twenty years not living in a walled compound with servants and chauffeurs. He terrorizes the vendors with his knowledge of the proper prices, and will barter with a boy until the kid thanks him profusely for his business, apologizing about the initially high price. Jean knows everyone in the city, it seems, and makes fast friends with those he doesn’t.

“So,” he said to us in his rapid French, “what brings you two into the city?” We told him about the president’s journey, and how we wanted simply to get out of my village, and see the convoy.
“Ah,” he said, “he won’t come until late this afternoon, most likely, so you might as well stay the night. Come to my house later, and I’ll cook for you, real French cuisine.”

Jean makes his money by traveling back to France every summer and cooking in a restaurant owned by one of his friends. Each trip he takes ready made pagne outfits and sells them to European tourists as traditional African wear. Despite the fact that most of the cloth in Togo is printed in Denmark and China, it really is the kind of stuff that the Togolese wear on a daily basis. Most non-Africans I know in Togo, no matter how dedicated to their Western couture, have at least one pagne outfit.

We told him we’d love to stay for dinner, and he finished his beer and said he had to go home and tell his wife so she could get to the market before it closed. In honor of the president’s arrival, the market would be shutting down at two-thirty this afternoon. He stood up and made to pay for his beer, but we shouted him down. “Merci,” he said. He held out his hand, and we both shook, and as he was leaving we heard him shout the second of his English phrases, “I go swimming naked on Tuesdays with my cigarette!” before he disappeared up the road.

We stayed at the bar all day, getting up only to go into the back and piss in a hole in the floor. We ordered platefuls of kebab meat, which the meat men mixed with grilled onions and tomatoes, and small mountains of ground red pepper. Vendors came and we politely refused them. Children walked up to beg for change, and we sent them to buy us cookies to earn their money. Around two-thirty, Jean came back, and said that everything was ready for dinner tonight. Along with the food, he’d bought two bottles of whiskey, so that when the sun set and we were full and comfortable, we wouldn’t have to leave his house for anything. The three of us then ordered new beers, and settled in to wait for the president.

By three-thirty, the clusters of red-berets we’d seen earlier were spread out along the road, directing cars and moto taxis into side streets to either find their way home on rock-ridden dirt roads, or to wait until the president’s motorcade had passed. Looking out from the bar, the soldiers formed a line up and down both sides of the street as far as we could see. Most boutiques and bars turned off their music, and people walking around looked continually up the street, hoping to be the first to spot a car.

Finally, around four-fifteen, the first car came. It was an olive green military jeep with a mounted machine gun, packed with soldiers. Two more of these followed, and then the cumbersome motorcycles of the gendarmes led into view a black river of SUVs, windows up and tinted. The president’s limousine sat in the middle. Spectators strained from behind the linked arms of the red-berets, trying to see in through the windows for a glimpse of the president. The three of us, the only white people I could see in that part of the city, sat unconcerned at our table, able to see over the heads of the people from the elevated porch. After the last SUV, there were more gendarmes on motorcycles, and then again three jeeps with mounted machine guns. Ten minutes passed, and the first taxi came down the road. The red-berets found benches in the shade and waited for a transport truck to pick them up. The Togolese shook their heads and continued on.

“Well,” Jean said, “what did they expect?” He lit a cigarette and leaned back against the concrete wall of the bar.
“I heard he threw money from the sunroof in Kamina.”
“Can you imagine your president driving around, throwing five dollar bills into the crowd?” Jean asked.
“No,” I said.
“Exactly,” Jean said. “That is no way to save a country.” He nodded to himself. We finished our beers and got up to leave. The waitress came back with our change. Jean handed her a tip of one hundred francs. “Merci,” she said. He winked at her.
“Oh my God!” he shouted, and we walked up the road.

Daydream in the Rain

It’s overcast and has been raining off and on all day. The paved road running through the village is wet and deep black and steams when the sun comes out. Along the road the air has the stink of worm/amphibial carnage. I remember walking from my house to the bus stop when I was a kid, a quarter-mile hike up and down a long hill, seeing the flattened bodies of nightcrawlers and toads. One toad I found had his guts spilling out of his mouth, the back half of his body completely flattened, painted cartoon-like with the imprint of a tire tread.

Here, though, in the sandy, tropical soils, worms are rare, and rarely as fat or long as the nightcrawlers of my youth. And while toads and bullfrogs can be heard chorusing in the night, their corpses are never found on the road post-rain mornings. Here it’s the crushed, snot-like bodies of snails splayed out along the rumble strips and the crumbling asphalt edges. Nights during the rainy season are murder for squeamish folks making frequent latrine sorties. Try going out without a flashlight or other illumination and the crickets’ rhythm will be interrupted on nearly every footfall as the full-bladdered person steps on innumerable escargots. They pop like lightbulbs. I shined my torch before me once during one of these excursions and found an uncomfortable amount of snails carpeting my little bit of grassless yard. Two or three at a time were gorging on my mucuna bean plants, leaving trails of worm-like shit and slime to dry over the leaves. My neighbors’ kids come into the yard often to collect the snails, and when they’ve got a decent amount stored under an inverted basin in their yard, they shuck them from their shells, skewer them and grill them. I’ve declined every invitation extended me to these feasts.

But so okay I’m on the road to go to the boutique to buy cookies, because there’s nothing better to do in the rain than to sit huddled under my paillote hidden from the kids to munch on biscuits, little drips of rain falling from the brim of my hat, my hand curled over the cracker, the crumbs tumbling and whirling through the air. I’m in a zip-up hoodie sweatshirt I bought in Spain in January, and I’m wearing it not so much because I’d be cold if I didn’t, but because during a rain wearing it doesn’t make me too warm. The temperature doesn’t ever really fall below 65 ° F, so I take whatever chances I get to bundle up.

My two years are officially over 6 December, but I’ll be able to leave no-questions-asked thirty-one days before that, so really I’m out of here like mid-November. Which means four months left in Africa. Twenty-two months spent here. I have dreams about icicles hanging from the eaves over the pick-up/drop-off areas of the Indianapolis airport, the defogger on my parent’s car wheezing with exertion, my teeth deliciously chattering despite every layer of elemental protection I brought with me, which, in the face of a Midwest winter, is nil.

The dream continues with arrival at the house, the yard lost beneath snow, perhaps a distress snorkel sticking up through the white, the only indication of a misplaced pet. A trip to the Marsh to pick up two cases of Budweiser, which we’ll bury in the backyard’s white mounds, while inside the house delicious-tasting things go through various stages of preparation and mastication. When everybody’s gorged and satisfied, me and the family go outside and hunt for twelve-ounce cans like Easter eggs, cracking them open and enjoying what’s inside. That’s my daydream. Cold weather and snow, good food utilizing more than two ingredients, and delicious beer served in reasonably sized containers. That’s what I miss, material-wise.

And but so like let’s snapshot me here, though, crossing the route to the boutique, watching a couple of kids in oversized windbreakers kicking empty tomato cans around beneath a palm-frond awning. I’m not unhappy. I’m wearing tan pants with brown piping down the legs and the imprint of a rooster perched between the words ‘Le’ and ‘Coq’ on the front in the left thigh area. I’ve got my grey hoodie, and a blue Texas Rangers hat given me by a recently departed volunteer. I’ve got a believe-it-or-not beard, which my family laughed at me over the phone when I said I’d managed to facially grow something resistant to a cat’s tongue. I’m twenty-fucking-four. Gasping for breath. When I left home I was un-tan, totally smooth visage-wise, and a sprightly twenty-two. Way ignorant in terms of third-world realities. I had a pretty quality digestive system. Etc.

Larissa and I had been with the new group of trainees on Wednesday, to talk to them about Volunteer mental health, how to avoid becoming an alcoholic, how to be a good listener. At the end of our presentation, there was time for interfacing, and a new-but-older trainee and I were talking about how the big advantage of Peace Corps service is internal, i.e., it changes you, and if you’re lucky you can step outside of yourself every now and then to observe these changes. The crux of the discussion was that it’s naïve to think that these changes or personal revelations are always pleasant, or conform to the propaganda Peace Corps uses to recruit people. The advantage of your service might be to reveal to you that you have no interest in doing stuff like this. Or that you’re way more cynical/conservative/racist than you thought. Ahem. Just speaking generally here.

So like then let’s return here to me snapshot crossing the road, at what is approximately revelation-time in terms of service, for me. I’m not unhappy. I’m disappointed in the way the ‘development’ work went (or didn’t). I hate the inability to blend in, the conspicuousness of my skin. When I say hate, I mean like loathe with my very core. I nearly had a nervous breakdown while biking from Sokodé to my village, shouting “I’ll fucking kill you!” at everybody that called me 'Anasara.' Women and children, too. I’m embarrassed, but I have to admit it. I probably would have really snapped if my village had been any farther away, because just when I felt I couldn’t take it anymore, on the edge of the teak trees that divide Babadé from Nima, somebody I didn’t recognize looked at me and shouted, instead of the ‘Anasara’ I was expecting, he shouted he said, “Mazabalo, bonne arrivée!” Mazabalo is my village name. And so then but like every single person I passed from him to my door waved to me and said “Bienvenue, Tony!” or “Bonjour, Mazabalo!” I felt like I’d let go of a breath I’d been holding in too long. I was back in village. I was home.

Not that I’m not impatient to get out of here. Every morning I draw a little symbolic X through the day before, arriving ever closer at the symbolically circled mid-November day of departure. It’s more like I’ve finally relaxed and realized that nobody is mad at me because there are things I didn’t do. They are happy with me because of the things I did. I know who they are, what their lives are like. They know the same about me. This makes being here a lot more pleasant and relaxing, realizing this does.

And but so like now I’m in the boutique. I’m unfrozen from the middle of the road. The kids kicking the can are pulling their jackets up to their ears while they say hello. The little one holds up her arms and says in her squeaky voice, “Tony!” I hold up my arms and say “Elli!” and bend down to give her a hug. Their mother is behind the counter, listening to some guy on his third or fourth shot of sodabe talking about himself. She sees me and straightens up and asks me if I’m cold, is maybe why I’m wearing all these limb-covering garments. I say I’m just pleased to be here. She smiles and asks me what I’d like. I hold out my money and simply say, “You know me.”

The Lightning

Many months before, the uncle of one of my good friends had died. He was old, but not old enough that his death was considered a joy, as are the deaths of the crippled women I often buy drinks for when they hobble in to the boutique, supporting their weight on a large teak branch. My friend’s uncle was an important man, a teacher and a middle school director, well known in the community, and equally liked. According to tradition, following the internment of the body, there was no funeral. Now, in March, the tail end of the season for such effusions of grief, it was time.

I had been in the capital for many weeks before the funeral. In truth, I hadn’t known about it until my return to the village. I was weary from the journey, and my pockets were considerably lighter. The local cuisine has a bland, usually fishy taste I cannot get around to enjoying, and even when meat takes the place of fish, the fat and the cartilage attached to the normal edible bits turns me off as well. Nonetheless, unwilling to cook, and having nothing really with which a proper meal could be made, I decided not only to go to the funeral to pay my respects, but to capitalize on the food.

My friend, whom I call by his family name, Nabede, welcomed me and bade me sit inside his house, where there was a television. I would have been content to sit in the circle of small stools, most of which were occupied by the village’s older men, doing much the same as I and scraping back all the food their hosts were willing to offer them. Perhaps it was my fatigue, or my desire not to make any kind of scene, but I did not protest to remain with the men, and allowed him to seat me on an uncomfortable high-backed chair in his parlor. The walls of the house were of mud brick, and the roof was the standard tin sheets nailed to a central support beam. In the afternoon sun, the room was stifling. There was no fan, and the breeze through the small barred window flickered feebly in through the lace curtain. He turned on the television to a sports channel and left me.

His wife, a couturier in another village, came in to bring me a calabash, a dried, hollowed out bowl-like gourd, of tchouk, the local beer brewed from millet. She left and returned almost immediately with a large plate of rice mixed with overcooked spaghetti. The sauce was thick and red, and a fall of palm oil dribbled down from the sauce into the rice. There was a dark brown hunk of indeterminable meat.

I ate and watched a recap of the previous year’s European Cup. By the time I had finished, I could hear thunder in the distance, and the sunlight was fading into the alkaline clarity of a semi-obscured twilight. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and stood up to leave. I shook the hands of all the men on their stools, and thanked my hosts. I walked home alone, watching small rolls of lightning in the clouds against the horizon.

I awoke the next morning to a muted world. It had rained in the night and no one was out. The houses were calm, the green of the verdure so fierce it seemed the world was plugged in. I felt comforted by the scent of wet soil, the air on which you could actually taste the filtering effect of various trees.

I put on some shorts and went outside. Lidao, the ten-year old son of one of my neighbors in the compound, was sweeping my portion of the yard, pushing the papaya and palm leaves that had fallen in the night into a compost hole I’d dug. “Bonjour,” he said, and then he asked, “Did you hear about what happened last night?” “You mean the rain?” I asked. “No,” he said, “the deaths.”

Over the next few days, everyone I asked gave different versions of the story. Some say the people had been outside, dancing in the rain; others said they were huddled under the small eaves of the roof; yet others averred that they had all been sleeping inside the house. Whatever the details, though, the story remains essentially the same. After I had gone home, the rain arrived. The rain here seems to be one of Nature’s angrier forces, for it rarely falls with the monotony and disinterest that is common in temperate zones. Nearly always the rain is accompanied by fierce blowing winds which, despite my efforts, blow water in through the wooden slats of my windows and under the space beneath my door. Then there is the celestial lightning, and thunder that shakes the water in its cisterns.

That night, aside from the driving rain, the lightning was low and rolling in the clouds. I remember watching it before going to bed; it seemed as tumultuous as a sea storm, and washed down from the north with frightening speed. All recounts of the story agree that, despite the rain and the lightning, the sound system and the large speakers were not only not disconnected from the main power line, they were not turned off at all. As the rain fell and the lightning broiled, the funeral attendees continued to dance.

Around midnight, according to Nabede, the only people left dancing were a group of about fifteen adolescents. As I said, what exactly they were doing at the time the lightning struck is disputable. Even the exact site of the lightning strike is unknown. Nevertheless, what happened is irrevocable and only too painfully known. All the houses branched on to the power line in that area had their light bulbs burst or burn out; meters were fried and the numbers frozen; those with televisions still plugged in had their sets destroyed. But the brunt of the electrical force was directed at the children. Whether dancing in the rain, huddled beneath the eaves, or sleeping under the tin roof, the lightning struck them. Two, a twenty-two year old lycée student, and a fourteen year old elementary schoolgirl, were killed. Four were seriously burned, to the point of disfigurement. The rest were burned on their hands, chests, and heads, painfully but superficially.

When Lidao finished his version of the story I went to speak to Lao, another compound-mate and good friend. He told me his version, and we sat on the steps of his terrace in near silence, speaking intermittently about what happened. “They say it is because God is angry,” he told me. “We have defiled the funeral ceremonies for too long, and now God has punished us.” Kpekpou, another neighbor, said that it was not God, but the fetish priests who were to blame. Somebody, he said, associated with the grieving family, must have angered the priests, and to punish them the priests had called down the lightning. It could simply be bad luck, I said, but they clucked in disapproval of my theory.

I made my way to Nabede’s house. His wife welcomed me in, but she was withdrawn, and immediately went to lie down again. Nabede was sitting in a chair, hunched over, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep. He vaguely indicated the burn marks on the walls of his home, where the surge had scorched the mud behind the power lines. His light bulb was intact but burnt out, a dark black smudge coating the interior. He had been this morning to help dig the graves. Now he was trying to rest, but he could not sleep. I told him about what my neighbors had said, that it was either God’s punishment or the work of fetish priests. He shook his head. “It’s just Nature,” he said. An explanation all the more incomprehensible for its simplicity.
“What happens now?” I asked. He looked up at me as though he did not understand the question, or the impertinence to ask it. “Nothing,” he said. “La vie continue.”

The next day, Monday, I was teaching troisième, the oldest class at the middle school. The director came in and made his way over to a student who, I had not noticed before, was burned on his forehead and his left hand. “Don’t you know better,” the director said, “than to play near electronics in the rain?” It’s the question I’d wanted to ask, though he posed it with considerably less tact.

Class ended at noon, and the students got up to file home for the long break until afternoon classes. I called the burned student over to look at his wounds. His skin was split open along the knuckles of his hand, the flesh pink and beginning to dry out. There was a small split in his forehead. The surrounding skin was a dark purple color, and the outer edges of the burn were the green of an old penny. He said he felt fine. The only people left at the dispensary were the four who were severely burned.

I didn’t hear any more of the incident for the rest of the day. It had been a bad month, with several deaths, and despite the grotesque nature of Saturday night, the sadness was subdued and it seemed as though the incident would go the way of the storm, leaving nothing for memory but a slowly eroding imprint on the ground.

The next day I had no classes, and woke up late to the sounds of people conversing in the compound. Every day, several women in the village make tchouk, and people go from house to house to drink. The woman in my compound, Lidao’s mother, whom I also call Maman, makes what I consider to be the best tchouk in the village, and the benches she arranged around the fence securing my part of the yard were filled with men, farmers either on their way to their fields or coming back from them. A few were discussing the lightning from Saturday night. Most, though, were lamenting the state of their fields. It was not yet the rainy season, yet they were already decrying the lack of a strong downpour. That seems to be the way with the farmers. Either there is too little rain or too much. Rarely does Nature get it just right.

I spent the morning drinking with the men, and by noon I was lightheaded and exhausted. Though it might not be the best way to become known, I’d built up something of a reputation for being able to drink like the villagers. When I first arrived, I would slowly sip one calabash while they would chug back two or three. I’d finally gotten used to the taste, and could drink just as fast and just as much as the men. My record for a day is nine calabashes, a feat which most people only attribute to the village drunks. I may have had four or five that morning, so I made myself some lunch, and went to sleep.

I woke around four o’clock, which is essentially the end of the day. By this time, afternoon classes are over, the men are done in their fields, and even some of the women are beginning to make dinner. I got dressed and decided to head to the boutique to see if any of my friends were out, starting on their nightly round of sodabe, a moonshine brewed from the sap of palm trees. On my way out of the compound, Madame Lao was sitting in her kitchen, a small room separated from the rest of the house so that the smoke from the fires does not become a nuisance. “Good afternoon,” she said, “are you heading up the road?”
“What’s up the road?” I asked.
“The judgment,” she said, “for the sorcerers who killed the children.”

The sky was already turning to twilight, an orange-purple glow infused into the atmosphere. The green of the mango leaves faded into the darkening sky, blurring the line where the trees ended and the night began. At the boutique, I asked the owner’s wife about the judgment. “C’est finis,” she said. Up the road, lines of men were heading in our direction, among them my drinking friends. Magi, a thin old man with a tobacco-stained beard, led the column, and was the first to turn into the boutique’s yard. “I just heard,” I said. “What happened?”

That afternoon, the chief was approached by two people, an old, stooping woman of nearly eighty years, and her son, a disfigured man I’d noticed in the village before. They’d presented themselves to the chief as the sorcerers who had called down the lightning during the funeral. “They said that they hated those kids,” Magi said, “and had been performing a ceremony for many months to have them killed.”
“Why would they confess to something like that?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t have,” he said, “but ever since that night they haven’t been able to sleep. In their dreams the children come to them to ask, ‘Why have you done this?’ They confessed so that their spirits would leave them alone.”

The chief then called the sub-chiefs and the village elders, and they held a judgment. The woman and her son were questioned and beaten, questioned and beaten, until the entire truth had come out.

“The old woman started the ceremony,” Magi told me, “and her son finished it for her.” There was no real motive given for the killing. Perhaps it came out during the judgment and was lost in the retelling, but I doubt it. People here are not concerned with motive, simply with deeds and their consequences, with crime and punishment.
“This is bizarre,” I said.
“But it all makes sense,” Magi said. The son, a man of about fifty, is noticeable in the village because of his deformity. It’s as though his face had been smashed and then smudged to the side like wet clay. He has no nose to speak of, just a lumpy scar over two nostrils under the inside corner of his right eye. His mouth, more a gaping hole with teeth than a usable appendage, starts in the middle of his face and slides into where his right cheek should have been. Magi said, “His face is like that because of his sorcery. He eats the bodies of his victims.” This was such a crime against Nature, he explained, that the man’s features contorted to reveal the depravity of his soul.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Tomorrow they will be beaten again, and then they will be banished. They’ll never be allowed to return to Babadé.” I stopped my next question before I could ask it. What about the gendarmes, or the police? What about justice? But they could do nothing. This is a case of sorcery, something the government formally denies no matter that every person I’ve ever spoken to, peasants and functionaries alike, believes in it. The best justice we can hope for is that these two will never hurt our village again. For the people of Babadé, that is enough. Grief resides in the unknown, not in the inexplicable. Sorcery is derided by the West, and missionaries have done there best to replace voodoo with Christianity, but in the end, what’s the difference? Voodoo is a religion as any other, with tenets and beliefs and practitioners; it is a gathered set of mythology and ritual used by people to give meaning to the unknown.

The next day in the village people were discussing again the lightning strike, the dead and burned children, the man who ate his victims, the mother who began the spells. Their tone seemed as grotesque as the crime itself, for there was an air of relief palpable in all the conversations. What happened was terrible, the explanation bizarre, and, in my opinion, all the more frightening, but hey, thank God we know what happened, right? I had never believed in the talk of sorcery in my village, and though when my neighbor died I had to accept the verdict that the devil had claimed his soul, I never really took it as validation for all the other stories I’d heard. This, though, was something else. There was an accident, wholly explicable by nature and electricity and human negligence; there was no inquisition, and no wish to begin an inquisition; yet there it was, the confession. We did it, we killed them. We cast a spell and called down the lightning, we killed those we wanted to kill, on the night we wanted to do it. How can I deny this? If I subscribe to the insanity of the sorcerers, I must subscribe then to the insanity of the entire village, and that is not possible. I have to do as my villagers have done, and be comforted by the fact that it was not God or Nature or the ignorance of the children and soundmen. It was sorcery, which can be controlled, either by an expulsion of the source, or, more common in less serious cases, by more sorcery. I won’t try to seek any logic behind it. Crime and punishment; that will have to suffice for me now.