The Famished Road

  Amidst all this Madame Koto was radiant with her necklace of white beads. As the evening progressed she got darker, more dignified, while the clientele got rowdier. She was untouched by it all, even when the men teased her. The original man with the big eye, which got more bloated as he drank, as if his eye were a stomach all to itself, said:

  ‘Madame, come and sit on my lap.’

  ‘Let’s see if you can carry your wine first, before you carry me,’ she replied, with great dignity.

  ‘This madame is too proud,’ said another man in the identical group.

  ‘Proud and strong,’ she said.

  ‘Come and sit with me, let’s talk about marriage,’ said the man whose head was like a tuber of yam.

  ‘Marry yourself.’

  ‘So you don’t think I am man enough?’ asked the original man, waving his three fingers for more wine.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  The bar rocked with the oddest sounds of ironic laughter. The men with dark glasses laughed very hard and banged away at the table.

  ‘Maybe that boy is her husband,’ said one of them, taking off his glasses and polishing them.

  His white eyes didn’t move. They were so birdlike, so ghostly, that I couldn’t tell what or where they were looking at.

  ‘That’s my son,’ she said.

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you sell him to us?’

  The bar suddenly became very quiet. Madame Koto stared at the two men with dark glasses. All the other customers watched her carefully. Then she turned to me, a curious gleam in her eyes.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So we can take him with us.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘Many places.’

  ‘For how much?’

  ‘As much as you want.’

  ‘You have plenty of money?’

  ‘Too much.’

  The silence in the bar was incredible. Then the midget laughed. He laughed like a goat. The tall man with small eyes laughed as well. He sounded like a hyena.

  ‘Name your price, Madame.’

  Madame Koto looked at the customers as if seeing them for the first time.

  ‘Any more palm-wine for anybody?’

  ‘Palm-wine!’ they cried in unison.

  ‘And peppersoup!’

  And they all burst out laughing and resumed their vociferous conversations as if nothing had happened.

  Madame Koto served them and they drank and ate and kept asking for more. They drank a great deal and didn’t get drunk. They sat, all of them, drinking and talking as if the wine were water. It was only the two men in dark glasses who got drunk. They kept polishing their glasses. One of them even brought out an eye and polished it and blew on it and dipped it into his palm-wine and pushed it back into his red eye-socket. Then he put his glasses back on. They chewed and swallowed their chicken bones. They ate and drank so much that Madame Koto began to despair. She had run out of wine and food and the night hadn’t even properly set in. As she bustled up and down, starting a new fire, making hurried arrangements for more palm-wine, the midget came up to me. Smiling very expansively, he said:

  ‘Take this. You might need it.’

  It was a little pen-knife. I put it in my pocket and forgot all about it. Then he went to the backyard. I heard him urinating in the bushes. He came back, smiling, and left without a word, and without paying. I told Madame Koto about it and she said:

  ‘What midget?’

  I went back to the bar. I sat down. The tall man said:

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘I will take you round the world. On foot. I make all my journeys on foot. Like a camel.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you don’t come with me I will take you by force.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  He smiled. The woman smiled as well. I decided they were more drunk than I had thought and ignored them.

  The bar was so full of people that there were no seats left. Some of them sat on the floor. I was nudged off my stool. The smells in the bar became terrible and strange, the smells of corpses and rain and oregano, of mangoes and rotting meat, of incense and goats’ hair. And then, suddenly, I found I could no longer understand what anybody was saying. They all spoke as if they had known one another for a long time. They spoke in alien languages and occasionally pointed at Madame Koto’s fetish. It seemed to amuse them. Then they glanced at me, made calculations with their fingers, laughed, drank, became solemn, and looked at me again.

  Madame Koto came in and announced that her supply of food and wine was finished. She demanded that they pay up and leave her bar. A great chorus of disappointment rose from the clientele.

  ‘Pay and go,’ Madame Koto said. ‘Pay up and go. I am closing up for the night.’

  No one paid her much attention. Her temper rising, she stormed out of the bar. The voices grew rowdier, wilder. Previously I had heard the voices before the people had materialised. Now, I heard the voices but, as I looked round, the customers were vanishing. I shut my eyes in disbelief. When I opened them the bar was completely empty, and completely noisy, except for the two albinos and a beautiful woman whom I hadn’t noticed before. On the far table were the two pairs of dark glasses. The original man with the bloated eye, the group that looked like him, the tall couple, the two white-eyed men, were all gone. The bar was silent and everything was still and the wind whistled faintly on the ceiling, as if a hurricane had passed and hadn’t been noticed.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ I asked the albinos.

  The beautiful woman smiled at me. The albinos twisted, shrugged, stood up, and spread out the sack. The woman distracted me with her smile. And then the albinos sprang at me and covered me with the sack. I struggled and fought, but they expertly bundled me in and tied up the sack as if I were an animal. And as I resisted, kicking, I heard the noises of the world, the voices of all the different people who had been in the bar. They talked in their inhuman languages in leisurely animation, as if they were merely setting out on a pilgrimage to a distant land. Overcome with fear, unable to move, surrounded by darkness and the death-smells of the sack, I cried:

  ‘Politicians! Politicians are taking me away!’

  My voice was very faint, as if I were shouting in a dream. Even if I had cried out with the voice of thunder, no one would have heard me.

  They took me down many roads, rough-handling me in the sack. They swung me round, they changed me from one shoulder to another, and the sack kept tightening about me. I heard the noises of lorries and cars, the tumultuous sounds of a marketplace. All the time I fought and struggled like a trapped animal. The more I strained for freedom, the more they tightened the sack, till I had no room to struggle. My feet were around my head and my neck was twisted to breaking point. I couldn’t breathe and I fought the panic that washed over me in waves. The blankness of death came upon me. I shut my eyes. It was no different when I opened them. At one point I fell into a strange sleep in which the figure of a king resplendent in gold appeared to me and vanished. My spirit companions began singing in my ears, rejoicing in my captivity and in the fact that I would soon be joining them. I could not shut out their singing and I’m not sure which was worse: being bundled away by unknown people to an unknown destination or hearing my spirit companions orchestrate my passage through torment with their sweet and excruciating voices.

  When I had fought and my energy was exhausted and I couldn’t do anything, I called to our great king, and I said:

  ‘I do not want to die.’

  I had hardly finished when the figure of the king appeared to me again and dissolved into the face of the midget. By now I had ceased to hear any sounds outside, except for the rushing of waves, the hissing of water, and the keening of birds. Suddenly, I remembered the pen-knife the midget had given me and began another struggle to find it. I searched my pockets. I searched the sack, and couldn’t find it. My fear became unbearable. Then a quietne
ss came over me. I gave up. I accepted my destiny.

  Water poured into the sack. I became convinced that I was being taken to an underwater kingdom, where they say certain spirits reside. As I tried to keep the water out of my mouth, I felt something metallic like a frozen fish banging against my head. It was the pen-knife. I wasted no time in cutting my way out. The sack material was very tough but the water had softened it a little and it took some time to cut my way out and when I did the outside world was black like the bottom of a well. I fell out into the water with a splash.

  ‘The boy has escaped!’ a voice cried.

  It was very dark, the river could have been the night, and the water was bitingly cold. I stayed under without moving. And then very gently I swam back to the shore, serene in my element.

  I struggled through the bulrushes and the tiger-lilies of the marsh, over twisted mangrove roots and flickering eels, and when I gained the soft silt-sand I went on running till I got to a main road. It was very dark; I was hungry, wet, lost; and I heard voices all around me, the twittering, vicious voices of my spirit companions wailing in disappointment. I ran till the road became a river of voices, every tree, car, and face talking at me, cats crossing my path, people with odd night faces staring at me knowingly. At crossroads people glared and seemed to float towards me menacingly. I fled all through the night.

  The road was endless. One road led to a thousand others, which in turn fed into paths, which fed into dirt tracks, which became streets, which ended in avenues and cul-de-sacs. All around, a new world was being erected amidst the old. Skyscrapers stood high and inscrutable beside huts and zinc abodes. Bridges were being built; flyovers, half-finished, were like passageways into the air, or like future visions of a time when cars would be able to fly. Roads, half-constructed, were crowded with heavy machinery. Here and there nightwatchmen slept under the stars with dull lamps as their only earthly illumination. The moon was round and big and it seemed bright with the face of an awesome king. I was comforted by its presence. I walked on with a terrible hunger for a destination, for Mum’s face, and Dad’s smells. I walked past the kerosine lamps of the somnolent street-traders.

  ‘Small boy, where are you going at this time?’ they often asked me.

  But I replied to no one. I wandered till my bare feet broke into blisters. And then, as I walked about in the darkness of being lost, I saw a disembodied light ahead of me, a tiny moon the shape of a man’s head. I followed the light. And it led me on longer journeys. And when I got to an area I vaguely recognised, my feet gave up on me and I collapsed at the roadside. I crawled to the nearest tree and curled myself up between its great roots which were above the ground and I fell asleep under the safety of the waning moon. The mosquitoes tormented me. The ants bit into my flesh and their stings persisted. But I slept through it all, and dreamt about a panther.

  When I awoke the moon was still in the sky, like a ghost unwilling to disappear under the force of daylight. It was dawn. A few people were standing over me, with puzzlement on their faces.

  ‘He’s not dead!’ one of them cried.

  I got up quickly; they came towards me with arms outstretched; I fled from them. I ran through the quickening dawn, with the sun riding the sky. The air heated, the sand warmed underfoot; and women of the new African churches, who wore white smocks and rang bells, cried out to the sleeping world to awake and repent. I passed prophets emerging from the forest with dew and leaves in their hair, cobwebs meshing their beards, their eyes demented with visions. I passed sorcerers with machetes that crackled with flames in the morning light, making sacrifices at dawn of red cocks, who poured gnomic chants on the untrodden roads. I also passed workers who had woken early and with sleepy faces made their ways through the mist, pierced by the sun, to the garages and bus-stops.

  My feet were fresh on the paths. Dew wet my ankles. Hunger dried my lips. News-vendors roused the dawn with their horns, announcing to the awakening world the scandals of the latest political violence. The industrious women of the city, who carried basins of peppered aromatic foods on their heads, tempted the appetite of the world with their sweet voices. The worms of the road ate into the soles of my feet.

  I came to another familiar place; the passionate chants of the muezzin roused the Muslim world to prayer. I had turned a corner, and had gone up a path that became a track, when three men in blue smocks rushed at me. I tore into the bushes, ran amongst the trees, and cried out into the echoing forest. Birds scattered from branches and pods fell from the tree-tops. I shook off the men, but I went on running, for the world seemed populated with people intent on me for one obscure reason or another.

  While running through the forest paths I stepped on an enamel plate of sacrifices to the road. The plate was rich with the offerings of fried yams, fish, stewed snails, palm oil, rice and kola-nuts. Shell fragments and little pins stuck in the soles of my feet. I started to bleed. I was so hungry that I ate what I could of the offerings to the road and afterwards my stomach swelled and visions of road-spirits, hungry and annoyed, weaved in my brain. I went on bleeding and a black cat with golden eyes followed the trail of my blood. My head boiled with hallucinations. I walked on broken glass, on the hot sand of bushpaths, on hot new tarmac.

  The roads seemed to me then to have a cruel and infinite imagination. All the roads multiplied, reproducing themselves, subdividing themselves, turning in on themselves, like snakes, tails in their mouths, twisting themselves into labyrinths. The road was the worst hallucination of them all, leading towards home and then away from it, without end, with too many signs, and no directions. The road became my torment, my aimless pilgrimage, and I found myself merely walking to discover where all the roads lead to, where they end.

  And then I came to a place where I thought the roads terminated. An iroko tree had been felled across it. The tree was mighty, its trunk gnarled and rough like the faces of ancient warriors. It looked like a great soul dead at the road’s end. Beyond, the road sheered into a deep pit. Across, on the other side, were sand-carrying lorries. Strange sounds lisped in the tree trunk, voices echoed in its hollows. I sat on a branch of the tree to ease my feet. And then, while the road-spirits raged in me, I saw a two-legged dog emerge from the forest. It stopped and regarded me, whimpering frequently. I was so amazed to see the dog standing on only two legs that I forgot my hunger and pain. It had a left fore-foot and a right hindfoot and it stood, wobbling, as though on invisible crutches. The dog stared at me. And with a heavy, inconsolable sadness it turned and limped away. In my astonishment at seeing it walk I followed it as it limped on curiously.

  The two-legged dog led me through the forest. It was a lean dog, with intense eyes and a sensitive tail and flea-ridden ears. I wanted to get rid of the fleas but I restrained myself and followed it at a distance, till I came to a clearing. I recognised the clearing at once. The dog limped on deeper into the forest. I watched it go and it stopped only once to look at me. I waved, but the dog did not understand my gesture. It went on limping, a solitary and heroic dog, surviving with only two legs and a sad face.

  I carried on home. At the edge of the forest I saw Madame Koto with a plate of chicken and yam in her hands. The white beads weren’t round her neck. She stopped at the roadside, looked in all directions to make sure no one was about, and proceeded with her passionate supplications. I watched her secret fervour. When she had finished with her praying and chanting, she lit a candle and put it on the plate. She placed a finger of kaolin and some cowries beside the candle. Then she straightened, undid her kerchief, looked in all directions, and hurried away. I passed her road offering. I scurried past her barfront. I ran home.

  5

  DAD WAS SITTING on his three-legged chair, smoking a cigarette. There were plates of uneaten food on the table. Mum was in the bed. The window was open and the light that came in increased the unhappiness in the room. Mum rushed at me and threw her arms round me, as if to protect me from punishment. She made me sit on the bed and began weeping
. Dad didn’t move.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked, in a dangerous voice.

  It was clear that neither of them had slept that night. There were circles of sleeplessness round Dad’s eyes. Mum looked as though she had lost weight overnight.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I was lost.’

  ‘How did you get lost?’

  ‘I played and got lost.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What about Madame Koto?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She came looking for you last night.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You didn’t tell her where you were going.’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Have you eaten?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Don’t ask him such questions,’ Dad said, loudly. ‘First he must tell me where he has been.’

  ‘Let him sleep.’

  ‘That’s how you women spoil your children.’

  ‘Let him rest, then he will talk.’

  ‘If he doesn’t talk he won’t rest. He has prevented my going to work. I want to know what he has been doing.’

  ‘Azaro, tell your father where you’ve been.’

  ‘I got lost.’

  ‘Where?’ Dad’s voice rose.

  He sat up straight. His chair wobbled.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You are a wicked child,’ he said, reaching for the cane he had beside him, which I hadn’t noticed.

  He came at me; Mum stood between us; Dad shoved her away and grabbed my neck with his powerful hand and bent me over and flogged me. I didn’t cry out. He whipped me and I kicked him and escaped from his grip and he followed me and whipped my legs and my back and my neck. I ran round the room, knocking things over in my flight, and Dad went on caning me. Mum tried to hold him, to restrain his fury, but Dad went on whipping me and he flogged her too and Mum screamed. I hadn’t uttered a sound and Dad was so enraged that he went on thrashing me harder and harder till I ran out of the room, into the compound. He bounded after me but I fled out to the housefront and up the street and I stopped only when I was a good distance away. Dad gave up chasing me, but he stood threatening me with the cane. I stayed where I was. He called me. I didn’t move.