‘Men of the compound! Watch your wives-o! There are thieves around-o!’
Someone else said: ‘Hah, quiet people are the most dangerous.’
Takpo pushed through the gathering. The women screamed. The men tried to hold him back, but he shook them off. He stood very close to Omovo, their faces almost touching. He breathed heavily into Omovo’s nose. He smelt of ogogoro. His eyes were bloodshot and wide open, his mouth twitched. His face was pitifully shrunken.
‘Omovo?’
‘Yes?’
‘My wife don run leave me, you hear? Ifeyiwa has run away, you hear?’
‘Yes.’
‘She run away and leave me one small note on paper, you understand? You see what you’ve done to my life? You see wetin you don cause, eh?’
Omovo was silent. He lowered his head.
‘I saw both of you when you entered that house. I saw you with my own two eyes, you hear me so? You see what you’ve done to me, eh?’
Omovo moved backwards.
‘Okay, I’m an old man. Now I’m finished. Are you satisfied, eh? Are you? So what did both of you plan, eh? What’s the plan?’
Omovo shook his head. Takpo continued, blasting his hot breath at Omovo.
‘Do you know how much I paid on that girl’s head, eh? If you sell all your things you can’t pay her bride price. I try to make her happy, I try everything, I gave am money, I buy am jewellery, I open shop for am, I give am gold, I buy am books, I look after am as if she be princess. But look now. Because of you she take my money, took all my money, took all the things I do for am and then she run away. You see what you’ve done to my life, eh?’
Omovo stayed still. He held his breath. He was baffled.
Takpo turned to the crowd, raising his hands, lifting his voice, in gestures of great agony. ‘How can a man know what’s in a woman’s mind, eh? How? How can a man understand a woman, tell me-o! I want to know!’
He turned back to Omovo. ‘All that time she was with me, all that time it was you, YOU, she was thinking of, eh? Maybe that’s why she refused to be pregnant! What was your plan, I want to know! I want to know…’
Suddenly, overcome by anger, Takpo fell on Omovo and slapped him, kicked him, scratched him, spat on him, wailing like a madman. Omovo bore it all without moving or flinching. Takpo began lashing out with his fists and shouted: ‘I’m going to kill you! I’ll hire people to kill you! Bring back my wife-o! Bring her back!’
The compound men swarmed in and pulled them apart. Omovo bled from the wound on his forehead. Long scratch marks ran down his cheeks. He went to the bathroom and washed his face. Then he went past the crowd again to his room. He sat and stared out of the window.
He sat motionless for a long time. The voices died down in the backyard. But Takpo went on shouting. After a while his voice also quietened. On an impulse Omovo got up and packed a bag. He, too, would go away. Some time ago Keme had given him the name and address of a friend’s family in B–, a seaside town outside Lagos, who might rent him a room. Omovo had often told of his need to find somewhere outside the city where he could paint.
While Omovo sorted out his clothes he came upon the ring Ifeyiwa had given him. He put it amongst the masses of his hair in the cellophane wrapping. (Much later he would keep the ring in a special place, as if it were a lucky charm. Then, later still, he began to wear it on his little finger. He kept the ring for the rest of his life.) The loaf of bread his relations had given him had turned mouldy. He threw it out along with Okoro’s hat. He packed his clean shirts and trousers into a leather bag. Then he concentrated on the items he needed for his painting. He took a few books – none on the visual arts. When he had finished he zipped the bag shut. He tested its weight, and was satisfied. He went and sat alone in the sitting room. He needed to gather himself. Too many things.
The mood of the sitting room seemed the same as ever. The same underneath. He tried not to think about anything.
Memories of childhood invaded him. He remembered being locked up in a room with his brothers while his parents quarrelled. Chairs were being thrown about, glasses were broken. Cruel words were shouted and endlessly repeated. He remembered one night in particular. His parents had been quarrelling bitterly while a storm raged outside. That night Omovo lay wide awake listening to the fury of the storm and the destructive passions of his parents, feeling the immediacy of doom. His mother howled. A door was banged shut. Outside the wind twisted the zinc roofing. Omovo began to cry. Okur picked up a book and threw it across the room.
‘It’s okay, Omovo, it’s okay,’ he said.
‘It will pass,’ Umeh added, getting up and looking out of the window.
Omovo went on crying. Okur got up and slapped him. For a moment there was silence. The storm wailed and thunder growled. Omovo felt his neck muscles twitch as he tried to control his terror. Then Okur embraced Omovo. Umeh embraced them both.
‘It’s okay,’ Umeh said.
Omovo suppressed the urge to break into a greater intensity of weeping. Too many things.
And then there were memories of his mother. He was at school when she died. He was playing football when he received a message that someone had come to visit him. It was one of his mother’s sisters. She had come to take him home. She was cheerful during the whole journey. At the funeral she wept so long and violently that it took six men to tie her up till she quietened down. They said she didn’t speak for nine days. That was the first time Omovo’s head had been shaven.
How did his mother die? No one seemed to know. The doctors said it was a heart attack, too much stress. Their father chose to believe she had an incurable disease. His brothers swore she had been poisoned, that a curse had been put on her. It did not matter in the end. She died, that’s all.
For a long time, thinking of her constituted a bitter, futile exploration of memory. How does one remember a mother who has died? By her face? Her eyes? As a half-forgotten selective series of acts? Her voice? Or a spirit, a mood that never leaves? The intangibility of his memory of her made it more painful.
She was a hard-working woman, determined, proud, on her way to prosperity. She had a shop that sold provisions – biscuits, cigarettes, sweets, kerosene, water. She had begun to branch into selling clothes. She was active in her town’s people’s meetings, was respected by the women of her village association, was invited to the naming ceremonies, the funerals, the weddings of the market women. People feared her. She had strong eyes. She was lean, even bony, but had an odd irrepressible power. She had a sharp voice and always said what she thought. She was quick to enter quarrels and could shout down any adversary. But she was also a good mediator in other people’s quarrels and was known to be very kind. Omovo’s father, envious of her, scared of her, treated her badly. The more she succeeded the worse he treated her. Then there came talk of another woman. His father wanted a second wife. Sometimes the woman was seen in the street. Then one day his mother fell ill. The expression on her face changed. Her spirit lost its fire. Her moods became strange. She complained of headaches, of seeing spirits at the shop, of nightmares. Her business dwindled. Her customers went elsewhere. She grew lean, her appearance became careless, a baffled expression entered her eyes, and she began to go around barefoot. She started to look slightly mad.
A mood of hope entered the house when his father announced that she would soon have a baby. Omovo remembered the afternoon when they were driven to the hospital by one of his father’s relations. As they sat in the lounge waiting for the good news of another baby Omovo and his brothers made bets about its sex. They were taken home in a strange atmosphere of gloom. They learnt that something had happened to the baby, that it had refused to live. When they got home from the hospital they found another woman in the house. She was spirited out through the backdoor. Her brown undergarment was found beneath the pillow.
Afterwards, as the quarrelling grew more feverish, Omovo’s father took to physically throwing his mother out of the house. She slept in front of th
e house, with her children huddled to her, with her possessions scattered all around her.
Sometimes she went away for months. Her absence made the silences in the house unnatural. Once, when she came back, she gathered Omovo and his brothers together. She stared at them with wide frightened eyes, as if she wasn’t going to see them again. She just stared and didn’t say anything. Okur and Umeh began to cry. Omovo went out of the house. He wandered about the streets for a long time and he did not cry. It was Sunday. Everything was quiet. He walked till he was tired and when he stopped he couldn’t recognise where he was. Everything turned strange. He felt as if he had strayed into a dream.
He sat down at the roadside and fell asleep. It was dark when a strange woman woke him up. Her hair was white, her limbs were graceful, her face was beautiful and long. She took him by the hand and led him to his street. Before he got to his home she had vanished into the darkness.
When he got home his parents weren’t in. They had gone out searching for him. His brother asked him angrily where he had been. Okur was about to hit him. Umeh stopped Okur. Then they held one another, embraced one another, in fear.
Omovo pulled himself away from all the memories. He got up and went to his room. The day passed. Evening came. He slept a lot and read. Night darkened his windows. He kept staring at the blank canvas, feeling the urge to paint rising in him, but not overflowing. The urge didn’t reach that pitch beyond which he had no choice. In between the waxing and waning desire to paint was the hunger to see his father, to talk with him, reestablish an old harmony. He didn’t see his father that night or the following morning. He didn’t venture out of his room. He felt he had somehow imprisoned himself.
He had been asleep, he hadn’t been dreaming, when he suddenly woke up. In the darkness, having woken up for no perceptible reason, he was confused about where he was. Had he strayed into a dream? Everything was stripped of meaning, of function. In that moment there was no relationship between him and the objects in the darkness. The bed seemed to be in the air. The chairs, the walls, the ceilings, the shapes of his paintings, the sprawl of his clothes, nothing had any connection with anything else. The capacity for linking things seemed to have dropped out of his consciousness. He felt he was floating on a black sea, he felt he was in a cave, in a dark space on another universe, in a different, unrecorded time. There were ghosts and shadows all around him, the humped figures of prehistoric rocks, of alien beings. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move. An invisible weight held him down. He tried to be calm. He tried to enter a state of prayer. The moment deepened. Something in him, a formless insurgent spirit, an energy the exact shape of his body, kept straining against the borders of his being as if it would burst out and devastate his senses, burst out into flame, into unbearable intensity. He breathed deeply. Then slowly. His mind freed itself. He prayed for everything. He prayed for all the faces he had ever seen. He began to recall the faces, to shore them against his terror. And the faces became crowds. He could not name them, could not give the faces names, nor name their features, so that each feature would make his seeing them more definite. Language failed him. There were things he wanted to say, songs that were breakers of spells, songs his mother had taught him, songs that were parts of stories told under moonlight in the village. He couldn’t sing the songs in English. The space that the language filled created a new emptiness. He couldn’t sing them in his language either. And so he could not keep back the crowds he had imagined into being. The crowds welled up in him, talking all at once, shouting, arguing, but no words came from their mouths. Their gestures were dramatic, they were passionate, they spoke three hundred and fifty-six languages simultaneously, and were not heard.
The yearning to hear them, to be heard, the desire to speak and to be understood in a language that flowed naturally, clamoured in his being.
A voice within him said: ‘You need a new language to be heard.’
The crowd disappeared. Colours replaced them. The colours flowed in startling configurations. The configurations grew brilliant with strange energies. Then the crowd returned, became concrete, remembered faces. Crowds at Waterside. At the garages. At the marketplaces. The bus-stops. Crowds of the ghetto ‘exodus’. Pouring down the roads. Masses of people silhouetted in the late evenings, streaming down the main roads. The roads jammed with cars. The cars surrounded by hawkers of boiled eggs. The crowds of the apocalypse. They had gathered somewhere. Then they froze in their gestures, in their shouting and arguing in the different languages.
Then they began to rampage. They tore down the houses on the exclusive lawns. They destroyed the whistling pine trees, the hedges. In the burst of their rage, their hunger, they vented their fury on all images of power, burnt down petrol stations, government vehicles, they overturned lorries and oil tankers, and then they themselves caught fire, their bodies incandescent, their hair yellow, their clothes burning green and blue, the crowd turning into colours blinding and without language. And as the fires swelled, shadows writhing within them, something swelled in him and suddenly snapped and burst out through his skin and escaped into the air as if a spirit had been blown out of him, and for the first time he heard himself scream. The invisible weight lifted off him. A wind blew over his head. From somewhere in the darkness he heard the elliptical beats of talking drums, he heard strains of an accordion. Intimations of meaning flowed in him. The moment of unreality passed. He slept soundly afterwards.
Morning came. Geometric points of light played on the bed. He listened to the sounds of the compound. He smelt the rising odours and fragrances of another day. He re-experienced the sensation of being trapped in his room. He stared at the objects on the walls, the shapes of broken calabashes with his engravings on them, his paintings and those of favourite artists, the Buddhist Chant ‘The Salutation to Dawn’ which he had written on a paper in his finest calligraphy, the shells dangling from the ceiling. He got up, washed, ate, and tidied his room. It was the morning of his departure.
When he had finished with these tasks he took his leather bag to the sitting room. His father was not around. Omovo suspected he had gone out on some obscure salvaging mission. Blackie had gone to the market. Omovo stood at the threshold of the main door. He looked at everything in the gloomy sitting room. For a deceptive moment he looked with the passivity of new eyes, as if he sensed better ways of using things about him, elements within him. But he felt the strange silence of the house and fear came upon him, the shadow of a large bird. The sensation was soon gone. But the shadow of the fear lingered, like a sudden wailing on a lonely night projecting itself into the recesses of the mind.
Before he left he wrote a letter:
Dear Father,
I have resigned from work. By the time you get this I will have gone to B–. I’ve no idea how long for. I need to be by myself and gather things together inside me, need to think. Besides I want to escape from the traffic jam of our lives. Don’t worry about me. Hope your business improves and that your spirit is well. I’ll see you when I get back. Enclosed is the little something you requested. Hope it helps. Good luck, Dad.
Your loving son,
Omovo.
PS: I really would like you to see my new paintings.
He left the letter on the table and set off on his journey.
Late that evening, surrounded by the lingering perfume of his wife’s absence, Omovo’s father read the letter. He saw hidden emotions, hidden meanings. He read it twice.
He remembered the day he threw his two sons out of the house. He remembered with shame the words Umeh had said that had made him so uncontrollably angry.
‘You always win arguments and lose battles, Dad. There’s nothing solid in our lives. The years have left the family behind. I’m frightened for us.’
His sons had struck a raw nerve. Instantly, for daring to criticise him, they became inescapable symbols of his failure.
They haunted him now that they had gone. Lately he had begun to have nightmares in which Okur bore down on h
im, a knife sticking from his throat. Nightmares in which Umeh kept laughing from behind him. When he turned he would see his first wife, with silver eyes and a toothless mouth.
Since their departure, his sons had been writing him letters which seemed calculated to unhinge him with guilt. He read them all. They wrote about their sordid lives. They sent photographs in which they were virtual tramps, with their eyes of deranged rebellion.
They wrote about their illnesses. Their debts. About getting into fights, their imprisonments, about being set upon by gangs of white men who hated black people. About the ships on which they stowed away. They spoke of themselves as homeless orphans. They wrote of their fights among themselves, their splits, their reconciliations. They never accused him and were utterly without self-pity. They didn’t seem to know why they wrote to him. Their letters had no addresses and tended to come from different cities, different countries. The last he heard from them was that Umeh had been stabbed in the chest during a gambling session. He didn’t know if Umeh was alive or not. In that last letter Okur said he had decided he wasn’t coming back home, that there was no home anywhere, except on the road.
The last letter also said they’d grown sick of writing to him and would do so no more. They hoped Omovo would take care of himself and carry on with the development of his talent. They wished their father the best.
He depended on those letters. He waited for them. They kept him hoping. He hoped that whatever it was that made them write to him would some day make them come home. He dreamt of a magnificent reconciliation, a mythical homecoming for his prodigal sons. Their last letter devastated him. For days he went around as if something had evaporated inside him. He acted strangely. He became forgetful. He began to have bad dreams. He functioned badly: business suffered. His concentration wavered, his eyes began to fix vaguely on the horizon, he stopped noticing things happening around him. And this drinking got worse. He drank in order to sleep. Drank in order to clear his head. Drank to celebrate. Drank to forget. Drank to survive the failure of his company.