The Famished Road

  I went out after Madame Koto. She was not in the backyard. I went to her room and pressed my ears against her door. From within I discerned a fever of chanting, a bell ringing, the beating of a gong, a soft voice soaring. The bird had become part of her mythology. I left off listening and made my way past the bar. The music had stopped, the voices were silenced. After a while Madame Koto re-emerged. She spoke briefly. The men departed, in a crowd, talking in hushed tones, as of a wondrous event. They had the gramophone with them. They kept looking backwards. The women stayed behind.

  3

  FOR A WHILE I wandered up and down the street, not sure of where to go. The smell of burning rats was still pungent in the air, so I followed the edge of the forest and explored the paths that had completed their transformation into streets. After a long period of wandering I burst into a world I had no idea existed before. The forest there had been conquered. There were stumps of trees, bleeding sap, all around. Workers in yellow helmets milled up and down the place. There were wooden poles jutting from the earth and wires were stretched in the air and trailed in cables on the ground. Children were gathered, watching an unfolding drama. I asked them what was happening and they said the men were connecting electricity. They pointed to the pylons in the wide open spaces. They pointed to the tents. I didn’t know what they were talking about so I watched in amazement.

  There were tents and lorries all over the area. In one of the tents swung an illuminated bulb. One of the boys stole into the tent with the sole purpose of blowing out the light. Before he could succeed a worker came in, saw him, and chased him out. We waited for the man to do something wonderful with the illumination of the bulb. But instead of doing anything he shut the entrance of the tent. We waited for something unusual to happen. We held our breaths. The tent entrance flapped open. And while we were looking, we saw the man come out again. His colour had changed. We could not believe our eyes. He was now a curious cream colour with blotches of pink. We stared at him in complete astonishment. His hair was like straw, like bright tassels of corn. He walked unsteadily. He wore dark sunglasses, but his eyes were visible beneath them. He wore wide-bottom shorts, a wide-brimmed hat, and a billowing white shirt. And then to crown our astonishment the man whom we thought had changed colour emerged from the tent. We suspected a devilish multiplication had taken place. We ran away, screaming. And came back.

  We stared at the white man, expecting him to fly, or to jump, or to somersault. Instead he gave bad-tempered orders in an unfamiliar language. When he spoke the workers jumped and obeyed as if his orders came from the wind. And when he sat down on a folding chair one of the workers brought an umbrella and held it over him. A lizard stopped in front of him, nodding. It stared at him for a long time. In a quick movement, he stamped on the lizard’s head and ordered one of the workers to throw its corpse away. We watched him, expecting him to lose his colour, or to dissolve in that blistering air. Another lizard came and nodded in front of him and scuttled round him twice. He stared at us. We stared at him. When he ordered the workers to drive us away, and when they pursued us with sticks and whipped us on the back, I conceived a terrible dislike for that white man. We watched him from a distance. The shade from the umbrella thinned and the sun, burning relentlessly, was unkind to him. I disliked him so much that I spoke to the wind and not long afterwards the air stirred, took on force, made the distant treetops bow, raised dust, and blew away the umbrella from the worker’s hand.

  The flies pestered him, circling his nose. Red ants formed an army round his chair. Soon he was stamping and scratching his foot. We laughed and he suspected us of some prank and he gave money to some of the workers and pointed at us and they came in our direction, abandoning the cables for a moment, and we scattered and ran, for we were convinced that if we were caught and taken back to the white man he would eat us up. I fled home through the forest and for the rest of that day remained in the safety of our familiar street.

  4

  WHEN MUM CAME back from hawking that evening I told her about the white man. A light of interest flickered in her eyes. But it died when she said:

  ‘The thugs came again today. Election time is near.’

  What I had seen was greater than my empathy at that moment.

  ‘How can a man become two? How can a black man turn white?’ Mum asked, with weary interest.

  ‘By magic.’

  ‘What magic?’

  Then I told her about the illuminated bulb and the cables and electricity, about how the white man had killed a lizard and how he wanted to catch us and take us away.

  ‘What were you doing there?’ she asked.

  I didn’t say anything. She looked lean and worried. She complained of a headache. She lay on the bed and I noticed that she had a wound that was bleeding just above her ankle. Her blood was unnaturally dark. The wound was beginning to fester. I told her about it, but she didn’t stir. The flies tried to settle on it and I drove them away. She opened her eyes and, in a rough voice, said:

  ‘Go and play!’

  I lingered at the door. The flies settled on her wound. I watched her foot twitch. She lifted up her head and was about to shout something when I hurried out of the room.

  In the street, people were fighting. They fought round the van. The sun turned red. The people who were fighting moved away in opposite directions, shouting threats. The evening darkened. Birds circled in the air. Dust and smoke, like a thin veil, hung in the sky. The wind roamed our street, blowing the rubbish along, and sweeping away the smell of incinerated rats and burnt rubber. Slowly, the stars began to appear.

  We waited all night for Dad to return. It seemed our lives kept turning on the same axis of anguish. When Mum had slept enough she dressed her wound with the ash of bitter-wood. She showed no signs of pain. She made food, cleaned the room, and counted her money in a tin-can. She calculated her profits without any light in the room. When she finished she began to repair our clothes, sewing on buttons, patching holes in Dad’s trousers. She stayed silent and worked with abnormal concentration, her forehead wrinkled, like someone using one action to focus on the pain of waiting. When she had darned Dad’s trousers, she began on mine. She tore off the back pockets of my shorts to patch the holes in between the legs. She gave my shirts many different buttons. She would not speak. The light got very dim in the room and I shut the windows to encourage her to use a candle. But she went on working in the absence of light. When she finished, she sighed. She put the clothes on the line in the room. The line was weighed down with a profusion of threadbare towels, old shirts, trousers, wrappers, and sundry rags. It looked ready to snap at any moment. Mum sat down. She was motionless. Then she said:

  ‘Polish your father’s boots.’

  What she really meant was: ‘What has happened to your father?’ I searched for his boots and polished them in the dark. Then I put them in a corner and went to wash my hands. When I got back Mum wasn’t in the room. I found her sitting on the cement platform at the compound-front. She was waving away the midges and the flying ants and slapping at the mosquitoes that invaded her body. It was night already and the sky was of the deepest blue. The air was cool and it tasted of rain. In the distance, towards the centre of the city, a white light kept flashing towards the sky. Some of the compound people joined us outside and made small talk.

  ‘Is it true’, one of them said, ‘that Madame Koto now has prostitutes in her bar?’

  ‘That’s what I heard.’

  ‘And that she has joined the party?’

  ‘Not just that.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘They have promised her contracts.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For their celebrations and meetings.’

  ‘We will be looking at her and she will become rich.’

  ‘She is rich already.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘People say she is going to buy a car.’

  ‘A car?’

  ‘And get electricity.?
??

  ‘Electricity?’

  ‘And she paid cash for bales of lace.’

  ‘Bales of lace?’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To sew dresses for party people.’

  ‘How did she manage?’

  ‘She knows what she wants.’

  ‘My friend, we all know what we want, but how many of us ever get it?’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘She must have used witchcraft.’

  ‘Or juju.’

  ‘Or joined a secret society.’

  ‘Or all three.’

  ‘Plus more.’

  They fell silent. They contemplated the night, their condition, and the whole area sunken in poverty. One of them sighed.

  ‘Why is life like this, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Some people have too much and their dogs eat better food than we do, while we suffer and keep quiet until the day we die.’

  ‘And even if we don’t keep quiet who will listen to us, eh?’

  ‘God,’ one of them said.

  The rest of them were silent. The wind blew over us, bringing dust, discarded newspapers, and the certainty of rain.

  ‘One day, by a quiet miracle, God will erase the wicked from the face of the earth.’

  ‘God’s time is the best.’

  ‘I wish God’s time and our time would sometimes agree.’

  ‘God knows best.’

  ‘That’s what my brother kept saying two months before he died.’

  ‘My friend,’ one of them said with sudden passion, ‘our time will come.’

  They fell silent again. Mum moved, started to say something, but stayed quiet. Then she got up, took me by the hand, and we walked down the raw street, towards the main road. She made it seem like an innocent walk, but I could feel the strength of her anxiety.

  All around us voices were raised in laughter and in pain. We passed a patch of bushes behind which resonated the singing and the dancing of the new church. They sang with a frightening vigour, with terrifying hope, great need, great sorrow. They made me feel that any minute the world would end. The singing from the church made me afraid of life. We passed them and could hear them long afterwards. Further on, behind a grove of trees, the earth throbbed with more chanting, dancing, singing. But this was different. The chanting was deeper, the dancing more virile, making the earth itself acknowledge the beating on its doors, and the singing was full of secrets and dread-making voices. They sounded like the celebration of an old pain, an ancient suffering that has refused to leave, an old affliction renewed at night. They were the worshippers at the shrine of suffering and we listened to their cries for the secrets of transforming anguish into power. We could hear the incantations, the money-creating howls, the invoked names of destiny-altering deities, gods of vengeance, gods of wealth, womb-opening gods. They too made me afraid of life. They too had come from the hunger, the wretchedness, of our condition. Mum didn’t seem to notice them. Her face was ridden with anxiety, her bright eyes searched the street-corners, the barfronts, hoping to see Dad. After we had walked a while, and when the wind lifted the edges of her wrapper, I asked her to tell me a story about white people. She said nothing at first. And then she said:

  ‘I will tell you a story another time.’

  We were silent. It seemed she changed her mind.

  ‘When white people first came to our land,’ she said, as if she were talking to the wind, ‘we had already gone to the moon and all the great stars. In the olden days they used to come and learn from us. My father used to tell me that we taught them how to count. We taught them about the stars. We gave them some of our gods. We shared our knowledge with them. We welcomed them. But they forgot all this. They forgot many things. They forgot that we are all brothers and sisters and that black people are the ancestors of the human race. The second time they came they brought guns. They took our lands, burned our gods, and they carried away many of our people to become slaves across the sea. They are greedy. They want to own the whole world and conquer the sun. Some of them believe they have killed God. Some of them worship machines. They are misusing the powers God gave all of us. They are not all bad. Learn from them, but love the world.’

  I was surprised with what Mum said. I was struck by the gentleness of her voice when she spoke next.

  ‘Do you know what my mother said to me in a dream?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She said there is a reason why the world is round. Beauty will rule the world. Justice will rule the world. That’s what she said.’

  We went on in silence. I wanted to ask her a lot of questions, but suddenly her mood changed, her intensity increased, and she hurried on, her ears cocked, the wind blowing us on, the night closing round us in the mysteries of its darkness. And then I, too, heard a voice crying out in the distance. It could have come from the thatch houses, the zinc huts, the mud bungalows, the tin-can houses, or from the enigmatic doors of the earth. Mum stopped at a crossing of paths. The wind was hard and the night howled. The whole area seemed to exhale an odour of struggle and death. Dogs fought near a well. And from the darkness, out of one of the obscure paths, emerged a figure in a dazzling white smock, bearing a lantern above her. The brightness of gems was in her eyes, her hair was utterly dishevelled, and if it weren’t for her smock I would have taken her for a sort of divine madwoman.

  ‘Repent! Repent!’ she cried. ‘The light is our life, and our life is in God! The world is full of evil. Repent! Or in your darkness you will be driven out.’

  We listened to her piercing voice.

  ‘Stay awake, you weak ones, guard your souls, for evils from Babylon have come to snatch your lives away! Repent! Ask for light and your sleep will be transformed!’

  She roused the wind and parted the darkness with her voice and soon we could only see the light of her lantern. And not long afterwards, emerging from the same path, staggering like one who has been a cripple but has now found some strength in his legs, was the figure of a man. He swore and cursed. At once, without even seeing his face, Mum ran over and embraced him. It was Dad. His hair was matted with mud. He wobbled, but insisted on not being helped. His clothes were torn, his chest glistened, his eyes were deranged, and he smelt of blood and drink.

  ‘Thank that woman for me,’ he muttered. ‘She saved my life. They were going to kill me but she appeared and they thought she was an angel and they ran away screaming.’

  We turned, but where there had been the light of the woman’s lantern there was only darkness. We could only hear her voice, speaking of a perplexing era to come, sounding from the distance. Her voice quivered on the night air, confusing her precise location. She could have been rattling the doors to our ears from a hundred different places in the living wound of our area.

  ‘If you can’t thank her today, thank her tomorrow,’ Dad said, in agony.

  Against Dad’s wishes, Mum held him under the arms and helped him walk. I heard her gasp.

  ‘You are bleeding.’

  ‘They were going to cut my throat. This is just a small wound. Azaro, my son, they were going to kill your father. Because I won’t vote for them …’

  His voice failed him. I held on to his other arm. The darkness filled with people. The night had broadcast our sorrow; the people knew what had happened. The faces, hungry and sweating, peered at us, following us, a long way down the street. They showered encouragements and strengthening proverbs on us. Mum thanked them. One of the women burst out crying. Dad hobbled on, his face screwed into a mask. The wind blew against us. Women sang in our footsteps. When we got home, Mum thanked them again, and they retreated back into the night, and left us to our unhappiness. The rest of the world was asleep.

  Mum boiled water and dressed Dad’s wounds and pressed his bruises. He told us his story. It was a familiar one. He had been accosted by some men. They were drunk. They asked who he was voting for. He said no one. They set upon him, took his money, were about to do something wor
se when the woman appeared. They fled. When he finished the story we sat in silence. Mum served food. For the first time in a long while Dad didn’t sit up smoking and thinking into the night, rocking on his three-legged chair. He slept promptly after he had eaten.

  He woke up the next morning complaining of stomach pains. The sheets had fastened to his wounds, which had bled at night. Mum had to apply warm water. The dried surface of his wounds came off on the sheets. His pain was reopened. He went to work as usual.

  5

  I REMEMBER THE day distinctly when, on my way back from school, great crashing noises exploded over the forest, as if all the trees had simultaneously fallen. For a moment everything changed. The sky came close to the earth. The air became charged, sharp, and unbreathable. I could not move. Then the air darkened, the noise exploded again, and a bright light flashed over everything. The sky split open. And the path became a clearing.

  The world was still, as if it had momentarily become a picture, as if God were The Great Photographer. The clearing turned into a new world. Out of the flash came the sharp outlines of spirits rising into the air with weary heads. And then they fell down and bounced and floated over the stillness of the world. The spirits passed me, passed through me, their eyes like diamonds. And when the next explosion came, followed by another blinding flash, the spirits were obliterated. The heaviness of the air settled, the clouds opened, and the first torrential drenching of the land began.

  The clouds dissolved into rain. Water flooded the earth. Suddenly, as if released from a spell, the photographic immobility of everything burst into commotion. The wind cracked the branches of trees. The people raised a great cry. Everyone began to run. Some dashed to clear their clothes from lines. Some ran for cover. And many ran for their buckets, hurrying to put them under the eaves, to collect the purest and most radiant water of the season. The rain released the children from the tedium of the long hot afternoons. They raised a different cry. They ran out naked, bellies protruding, screaming joyfully as the bright water soaked them, foamed their hair, and made their skin shine.