These spirit-masters of the spirit universes brought The Way which had since been corrupted by succeeding generations, by greed and decadence, blindness and stupidity, by vulgar kings and dim-witted chiefs, corrupted and turned into sinister uses in the eternal battle of ascendencies. These invisible masters brought fragments of the Original Way in their silent procession, drawing back to its centre the valuable truths in our stolen heritage, our dispersed legacy, our myths coded with wonderful secrets of living, our splendid feats of memory and science and mysticism, art and learning, poetry and thriving in a universe of enigmas, our accomplishments denied by the dominant history of the short-sighted conquerors of the times.
I saw them with their celestial caravans of the forgotten and undiscovered African Way, and maybe I marvelled. Behind them were the wondrous animals also forgotten to man, whose legends are enshrined in the hieroglyphs on tree trunks, the old mighty trees that retain the stories of the land in their deep roots, always feeding our realities back into the womb of the earth. And then I saw many of the inhabitants of our area amongst the spirits of the great journey. I saw the shoe-maker, the sign-writer, the magician of the bronzes, sorcerers, I saw our neighbours, familiar children. I even saw dad amongst the spirits. He was walking in the air, light and serene, surrounded with blue flames. A silver butterfly circled his head. And when I saw that there were some of us in the procession of spirits who were still alive, the heaving thoughts lodged in my brain came unloose and horror rose in me. I broke out from my slumber of stone and death, from the visions of another world hidden behind ours, and I ran everywhere looking for my mother.
Feeling my way through the cobwebs that had entangled us in the space of my vision, surprised at how thick the webs were, I searched for mum all over the street, and couldn’t find her. I ran to the spot where I had last seen dad, but he wasn’t there. I searched for a long time, weaving in and out of the labyrinths engendered by the visions, stumbling over the listless bodies at housefronts, avoiding the people who had died standing, and it was only when I noticed a silver butterfly in the air that hope came to me in the only sign which had appeared during those short days when fear obliterated our memory.
I followed the butterfly and it led me to the edge of the forest. I found dad standing in front of a giant tree, with a frozen startled expression on his gaunt face. He was staring wide-eyed at the tree trunk as if he could see into its lighted interior, or as if he were reading a prophetic script on its bark, and as if what he saw had turned his brain to marble. The butterfly circled dad’s head and then flew up into the air, disappearing into the darkness, turning into a pulsing star over the trees. I didn’t know what to do with dad, so I touched him. When I touched dad he screamed suddenly, jumping back, startling me. He looked around him with bewildered eyes, taking in all the chaos that the upheavals had created. Then he stared at me a long time, tears streaming down his face.
‘Why are you crying, dad?’ I asked.
‘Because, my son, you have woken me up from the most beautiful dream I have ever had.’
I stared at him in silence. Tears still poured down his face.
‘And now I can’t even remember the dream.’
He looked very miserable.
‘How long have I been asleep?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I feel as if I have been dreaming for many days.’
He wiped the tears from his parched face and after another long silence he asked me about mum.
‘I can’t find her,’ I said.
‘Let’s go and search for her,’ he said, holding my hand.
We walked over the rubbish and the dead birds. We passed the standing forms of our neighbours. As we passed them dad touched each man sleeping on his feet. And as he touched them they widened their eyes: with confused, astonished cries, they broke into a babble of voices, and all at once I realised that the people who were standing as if they had been turned to stone were in fact in a deep and unfathomable sleep. And when they woke up they jumped, and fell, and got up, and looked around at the mess and detritus. And they all complained with bitter tears in their eyes that they had been woken from the most profound dreams of their entire lives. One by one the people of the area awoke from their leaden slumber, and one by one the voices rose in the air, speaking of wonders lost to them in their awakening.
As if their sleep had been a chasm which separated them from our reality, they looked upon our wrecked world with stupefied eyes, unable to ascertain whether the dreadful changes had been wrought while they were dreaming.
Without knowing it, dad had broken our silence. Everywhere people spoke abundantly. They talked of unrecorded and forgotten miracles, unremembered signs. And it was only when we found mum profoundly asleep on a bed of rotting vegetables, with yellow butterflies in her hair, that dad screamed again. This time his excitement was almost insane. He shook mum awake on her bed of vegetables, and then he went everywhere, waking people up, waking the old woman curled up near rusted buckets, the young men stretched out on the dry earth, and old men asleep in bushes, with only their feet visible. Dad went around shouting that he had remembered fragments of his dream and the messages given to him during his sleep. He was quite demented. His old energy seemed to have returned, and he went around with the peculiar madness of those who have survived a perilous journey. He was the only one whom sleep had not caught in its labyrinths. And he tramped about, alarming us, shouting that the world was not going to end just yet. Then he gathered us all together and told us he had dreamt, in parts, that the butterflies were weeping for a new life, that the butterflies had to be burned, that they had to die properly for greater spirits to be born. He dreamt also that we were all turning into dead butterflies and that his spirit left him and became a silver butterfly which soared into the adventures of eternity, adventures so extraordinary that if he had remembered them he would have become very great, very happy and very wise. People’s voices rose in wonder and I heard them saying that they had more or less dreamt the same thing.
Given our penchant for dwelling too long on the wondrous and the fearful, we began to talk too much, exchanging fragments of dreams. Dad grew impatient. With great vigour, and with the voice of a soldier who had received his mandate from the crisis of the moment, dad hustled and commanded and organised the inhabitants of the area. He got us to bury the corpses of birds and animals. He made us gather the dead butterflies. We worked all through the night, sweeping and carrying the butterflies to the middle of the road. All the children had their hands full of golden and blue-winged butterflies and the women had their basins full and the men had brooms and buckets. We dumped them on to the growing pile and stared with horror at such a mysterious species, wondering aloud about what manner of plague had killed them off.
When the gathering of the butterflies had been accomplished a herbalist amongst us took over the priestly role. He poured libations on the parched earth and made a lengthy prayer. Then dad drenched the obscene heap with kerosine. When he threw a lit match on the heap the whole thing burst into an incandescent blue and yellow combustion, accompanied by an explosion that took us aback. The fire swooped up and burned with strange fizzling noises. As the flames lit up the darkness, flaring erratically, we gasped in terror and amazement at seeing spirits rising into the air on golden plumes of smoke. The brightness of the spirits momentarily blinded us with the sudden sweep of daylight illumination. When the spirits rushed out from the crackling heap, and vanished into the darkness above our heads, the fire suddenly went out, plunging us into profound blackness. For several minutes we stayed still, unable to breathe, unable to speak. And as the silence lengthened, the darkness deepened. The terrible strangeness of our condition returned. Then, one by one, under the cover of a darkness that almost rendered us invisible, and without saying a word to one another, we went back to our rooms. We didn’t stay together as a community. For the first time in several nights we went back to our different forms of isolation.
/> We did not speak after the incident of the fire because we weren’t sure of the reality of what we had witnessed. It may also have been that in witnessing a sign that we couldn’t interpret we were left with a vaster fear, a fear that had permeated the fabric of our lives.
Mum and dad didn’t sleep that night. But I did. I wove in and out of dreams. In the dreams I was riding on the back of the road, and the road became a snake that writhed all over the place, wrecking houses and causing accidents. But when I finally arrived at the destination of the next morning, the world had become a little different.
21
HOW HOPE CONQUERS LETHARGY
EVERYWHERE, CROWDS OF people were talking about abnormal miracles. Someone said they saw rainbows flying in the air, with angels riding them as if they were horses. A woman claimed that while walking she had slipped into another world, one which she described as the heaven of birds. She swore that there were many worlds, that there were places where the spirits of dead fishes dwelt, where all the extinct species of the earth roamed, ate and played in the complete freedom of a world without wicked and thoughtless human beings. She also claimed to have entered a universe of shadows and that she had seen all of us there, as if a part of ourselves lived on in another sphere while we slept.
When she had finished, a neighbour gave his own testimony of a wondrous event. While combing his hair the previous evening he had noticed a flash; on looking into the mirror, he saw that his hair was on fire. The fire was yellow, but it did not burn him, and it was only after he had slept and woken up that the fire disappeared. Other people claimed that electric sparks flew off metal stuck in the earth, and that every now and again the air crackled without explanation. A woman said she had dreamt of the blind old man turning into a lizard.
The world, for a moment, seemed new. It was strange to see how our zest had returned, how a mysterious hope was conquering our lethargy. We saw how everything could be different. We dreamt collectively of a new paradise on earth where human beings could live without fear, and so bring about a second golden age of wonder. That day, undirected by anyone, we began to clear up our environment. We gathered the garbage. The carpenters enlisted several men and started to rebuild the broken beams of houses. We burned the garbage and the stinking mattresses, the uprooted bushes. We chopped up the fallen trees. We re-allocated living spaces for the homeless amongst us, making them sleep in our different rooms on a rotational basis. We emptied our fallen water tanks of their poisonous fishes and tadpoles, and washed them out thoroughly. We cooked massive pots of food, and ate as a community.
Two days after the burning of the butterflies, the sky darkened. We stopped in our labours. We looked up, our minds empty, fearing that we were dreaming into existence another frightening phenomenon. Suddenly the sky cracked open, revealing the startled spirits of the air. The crack closed; a forked flash divided the heavens and we all ran into our rooms, screaming that the world had exhausted time, and that the end of all things had finally found us. And then the miracle of rain poured down on the baked earth, on the wounded roads, on the inexplicable chasms that had opened in the remote edges of the forest. The rain lashed down its bizarre blessedness, drenching the houses without rooftops, filling up the empty wells, covering the street with bright waters. As the rain crashed down we saw a rainbow sailing in the sky, as if blown by an abnormal wind. It rained on the piles of garbage, and our efforts at rehabilitation were interrupted. The paths seemed re-organised. We heard the water steaming as it sank into the earth. All along our street the little children were out naked, dancing and bathing in the rain, with the water turning into foam on their dry skin. I ran out and joined them and stayed under the surprisingly warm water, playing and jumping while the adults looked on with nostalgia in their eyes.
When I came out from under the rain, shivering and alive, mum seized me and, laughing, towelled me vigorously. Then she put me to bed and I slept for a long time and had magical dreams which I forgot but which left a glowing lightness in me. When I woke, the world had returned to a curious normality.
It had rained for three days. I had slept most of the time, had woken up and wandered under the eaves of the surviving houses, and had slept again without being able to distinguish my waking from my dreams. On the fourth day the rain stopped. The sky was clear. Insects had returned. Frogs croaked. The weeds and bushes had somehow accelerated in growth, as if the rain had in its waters the essence of all fertilisers. Our devastations remained: the rain had washed away something heavy in us, had cleared the murky spaces, had expanded our sense of wonder, had enlivened our faces, made our eyes sparkle, brought hope to our embattled spirits, had made us dream of a new horizon as vast as the limits of mighty waters, but it had not obliterated the rubble, the rubbish, and the destruction of our possessions. The wounds on the surface of the roads had healed, the cracks and pits had been filled with mud, but the undulations and the writhing shapes remained. The road remembered all, but for the time being its mouth was covered in water.
Through the days and nights, with a mild sun and no moon, we worked on, repairing our houses, disposing of the rubbish, rebuilding sheds and shacks and stalls. The carpenters multiplied. The bricklayers worked solidly. Our landlords came to visit, brought builders and trucks of cement, and reconstructed their properties while we worked on in hunger.
22
THE GENEROSITY OF SORCERERS
WHILE WE WORKED at re-making our lives the blind old man became the perfect gentleman of our area. He wore white suits, dazzling silver-coated sunglasses which reflected everything, and carried a black crocodile-headed walking stick. He had a well-dressed young woman for a guide, and he took an interest in our troubles and in the devastations. He pointed his walking stick at our broken houses, and expressed a greater sense of outrage than we did, speaking excitedly about the necessity of social justice, good housing for the poor, macadam roads, widespread electrification, and tap water for all. He offered his services and staggered about the place trying to help us carry beams and planks, staining his suit, dismissing the solicitations of his guide to be more careful, blindly carrying rubbish to the heaps where it would be burnt, trying to invigorate us with his words of encouragement, offering to contribute money for the treatment of the wounded and the ill, weeping for our poverty and vulnerability, saying how much the lively spirit of the community had changed. It didn’t occur to us at the time to mark the fact that his own house had been untouched by the upheavals and the earthquakes. But it must be said that he showed us great generosity, and it was touching to hear him remark how our co-operation in crisis reminded him of his youth in the village when rogue elephants destroyed the farms, felled trees, and smashed the huts.
While we worked he would sit in our midst, with a bottle of ogogoro on a small table next to him, and he would draw out old melodies from his trusted accordion. He played us work songs, folk songs, and songs that accompanied heroes through their tribulations and their momentous journeys. It came as a surprise to us that he could play so beautifully, or that he played any music at all in the midst of our troubles. He played with great feeling. Yellow tears rolled down his face as he squeezed out solemn funereal music that seemed to have travelled across to us from the unrecorded centuries. He stirred old feelings in us, but we did not warm to him. His music threw a bridge from his weird nature to our wrecked lives. From the hidden depths of his feelings, the beating core of music that contained the compressed intimations of struggles without end, we glimpsed something quite disturbing beneath his new guise. He confused us. He had appeared in many manifestations, as a bull with multiple horns, as sorcerer of the elements, but now his features looked softer and gentler. The bitterness that had encased his aged crumpled face seemed to have dissolved. He looked more like us. He looked nice and trustworthy, even normal, even warm. Moved by his own music, which seemed to make him feel more deeply the wretchedness of our lives, he dabbed his yellow tears with a white handkerchief. His harshness was gone. His voice
had lost some of its vile cackle. It was as if in unleashing so much evil he had become almost good; as if in expending so much of his dark transformative energies, he had lost the ferocity of his poisons.
23
THE KINDNESS OF CURFEW-MAKERS
EVERYTHING WAS CHANGING, the face of the world seemed an endless series of masks, and we did not know what to believe. We heard that Madame Koto had lost weight, and was now so beautiful that men were leaving their young wives to follow her around slavishly. We didn’t know if these were stories manufactured from hallucinations, because for a long time not one of us had set eyes on the fabulous Madame Koto. The only time we saw her was when she invaded our dreams with waves of her mythology.
And then one day, as our labours brought some normality back to the area, she appeared to us. It was a bright afternoon and we saw her resplendent in a red dress, with sequins in her netted hair. Madame Koto seemed like an absentee monarch who had returned suddenly to re-assure her subjects. She appeared to us briefly, full of smiles, beautiful in an oiled ripeness, like the grasshopper in the fire, growing more radiant and stunning as her destruction drew closer. She had indeed lost some weight, but her stomach was still massive with her abnormal pregnancy. Her foot, also, was still swollen. She had a white walking stick and she hobbled amongst us, full of commiserations, promising that her party would do everything in their power to help us in our plight.