To Omovo he behaved the exact opposite of how he felt. He became a little hostile to his paradoxically named son. He became colder when in fact he felt a greater tenderness for Omovo. But at no point did he concede, or contemplate conceding, that his sons were right. His life was not empty. As far as he was concerned things were too complicated for the young minds of his children to understand. Their time would come. He would see if they would survive the confusions in which life makes everyone flounder.
He had always had a special fondness for Omovo, the son who had opted to remain at home, the son in whom he had nurtured a love for art. Over recent years he understood Omovo’s paintings less. They had grown more grim and uncomfortable. They, too, seemed to accuse him. He often wondered why his son couldn’t paint happier subjects. Now he had lost contact with the only son who was close to him, lost contact with most things, it seemed, apart from Blackie, centre of his life. How he needed her, relied so much on her.
But Omovo’s letter had touched him. Much as he tried he couldn’t deny that it was, in a curious way, a gesture of love.
He had often wanted to ask Omovo why he had shaved his head. What was he mourning? It troubled him that his own son looked so strange, bony, awkward, silent. He had often wanted to embrace Omovo suddenly, to tell him stories. He had sometimes sensed Omovo wanting to talk to him: he had seen the words struggling across his face. But, unable to bear his own sadness, he had always turned away before Omovo could speak. He couldn’t control this reaction.
The day that he gave Omovo the letter from Okur he had strongly resisted the urge to break down and off-load his problems and fears, to ask his advice. On the day that he was reading the last letter from Okur and Umeh he was truly startled when Omovo had stumbled upon him. It was as if his sons had returned to renew old quarrels. When he read in the newspapers stories of riots and racial violence in Western lands he feared for his sons, he prayed for them. He feared for them but he was essentially afraid of them. He was afraid of their power to hurt him.
He stared at Omovo’s letter. Then he stared at the bottle of ogogoro on the table. Then, suddenly, as if he had been hit on the head from behind, he felt himself plunge into darkness. A moment later he realised that the lights had been cut. The mosquitoes found him in the black-out. The heat rose in his skin. He became aware of Blackie’s perfume faintly scenting the air. She had gone to the market and yet her perfume lingered. He wondered what had happened to her. He felt lonely enough as it was. But her perfume made him feel lonelier.
7
Ifeyiwa travelled with her illness, she travelled in a state of extended hallucination. Her journey seemed a kind of dream. She still felt feverish when the lorry dropped her at the village junction. The lorry driver would go no further. The women in the lorry advised her not to go to the village at that time of the night. They suggested that she should find a place in town to sleep till dawn. One of the women even offered to put her up.
But Ifeyiwa had travelled three hundred and twenty miles, and her legs were stiff. Her back ached. She hadn’t once thought of her husband. She had thought only of her liberation. She remembered that she had always been able to walk free in the environs of her village. As far as she could see nothing had changed. While she got her bag off the back of the lorry she noticed a file of women with firewood on their heads, lamps in their hands, staggering along the dark road. She had come this far and could now breathe the air of her oldest dreams.
When she made her decision to walk home to her village from the junction, she experienced a moment of lucidity and resurgence. She wanted to surprise her family, she wanted an unexpected homecoming. The women’s advice only had the effect of convincing her that her decision was the best one. She could no longer fully trust other people’s statements about how she should live her life. They had deceived her too often. They had led her here. Overcome with the freedom that lay just ahead of her in the darkness, along the beaten track that wound past the village shrine to her home, she felt certain she would now make her own decisions, go her own way, wherever it led.
And her mother lay ill just a walking distance away.
As Ifeyiwa stepped back from the lorry the women warned her again. ‘Don’t go-o!’ they said. ‘There is trouble in the air.’
Ifeyiwa felt the tug of their concern. The moon was bold in the night sky. The wind made the leaves rustle. She smelt woodsmoke on the night air. She experienced the mysterious lucidity of convalescence, the great pressure of its hopes. In that moment she had a belief, a faith, in the goodness of the world. She had faith in her freedom. It will not be in vain. The women said a traditional prayer for her and wished her luck. She wished them a safe journey. The lorry started and drove off slowly, its tail lights like two red eyes vanishing in the distance.
Alone on the beaten track, in the darkness, with the moon above, she experienced an ecstatic sense of liberation. She jumped. She ran. She sang. She was young. She was almost home.
The smells of firewood burning at night, of fish drying on the racks, came strongly to her. She was overwhelmed with the herbal aroma of the farms. The earth breathed out its deep essences. The wind rose and blew frenziedly. Branches cracked as if unnatural forces had wrenched at them. Suddenly questions began to nag her. What had she been freed into? The lorry had gone. Had she made a mistake? She stopped. Her mind was calm. She heard her mother’s voice in the wind. She remembered the feelings of being a child and singing or playing under the supervision of moonlight. She remembered the nights of storytelling. The nights of rituals, when goats were slaughtered and the blood from their necks fertilised the darkness of the earth. She remembered the festivals that went on for seven days, culminating in the night of the unpredictable masquerades – the masquerades from which the women and children had to be protected.
She remembered her father’s farm with the large obeche tree right in its centre. Strange birds sang intermittently in the dark. The sky turned violet. Bursting with clarity, she hastened home. Those birds, yes, those birds. She listened to them. Birds of the moon. Birds of omen. She had heard them in her dreams. As she went past the village shrine, housed in a hut without a door, she had another vision of how she could live, of the person she could be. Shortly afterwards she heard a man’s gruff voice say:
‘Stop! Who goes there?’
Wrenched from her thoughts, the night hazing, the bushes suddenly coming alive, she found she couldn’t get her words out. Her throat went dry. Thinking it all a horrible dream she turned and saw her dead father staring at her, his face bold as the moon, his eyes empty. She heard rapid voices.
‘It’s a spirit.’
‘An animal.’
‘An enemy.’
Then a shot was fired.
Two days later her body was found on the shores of the brackish stream near the neighbouring village. No one was sure who was responsible. But her people took it as a sign of unforgivable aggression and the fighting between the villages reached new heights of bloodshed. Three days afterwards a young man returning from the farms was shot. Ifeyiwa’s mother sued for peace. Meetings were held. A ceasefire was heeded. For a while peace reigned along the village boundaries.
Both villages had other problems anyway. The government was going to build a major road right through them. That meant unacceptable resettlements. The yields from crops had been poor for many months. They had no electricity and no water supplies. The youths were leaving for the cities and the villages had become rather ghostly, inhabited only by the very old and the very young.
Time passed. Ifeyiwa’s death acquired other dimensions. Some said she had killed her husband and was on the run. Others said she was sick of life and had offered herself as a sacrifice. For a while, amongst those who didn’t know the true story, it seemed as if her death would give birth to a legend.
At one of the meetings intended to effect a permanent reconciliation between the villages, an elder said: ‘We are killing ourselves over a problem which the white man caused
in the first place. Let this innocent girl’s death be the final sacrifice. Let us solve this problem in our own way.’
The peace lasted till other things came along and fuelled the old hatred which had never been examined, never exorcised. At another futile meeting just before the outbreak of fresh violence the priest of the village shrine said the spirits of the land had been angered. No one listened.
‘What was her sacrifice for?’ he asked. No one answered.
Book 5
1
When Omovo set out on his journey he had no clear idea what he was escaping from or what he expected to find. He arrived in the town of B– disorientated. The address that Keme had given him seemed clear enough, but finding the place exhausted him. He had to walk halfway round the ancient town, he was frequently misdirected, and the heat was excruciating. The town confused him. He didn’t understand its transport system. And the name he had been given was spelt wrongly. It turned out that he was to stay with one of the most important chiefs. And to make matters worse, the address was of a place quite close to the garage.
The chief wasn’t in when he arrived. He had to wait for hours sitting on a bench in the corridor, hungry and confused, before one of the women of the house took it upon herself to show him the room. She was the chief’s youngest wife, and didn’t speak English. She too was new to the town and didn’t seem to know where she was going. She led him through the market, down all sorts of dirt tracks, took him through large compounds full of children and old women, stopped to talk many times, and effectively took him round the town again to three different houses before they got to the place. It was a small house that was really just a room. At first Omovo thought it was an abandoned shrine house. In the backyard there were masks and jujus on sticks. Not far from the house was a graveyard. Beyond that could be heard the lispings of the wind on sea.
Omovo was totally exhausted when he arrived. He was virtually sleepwalking. He felt as if his identity had in some way been scrambled up. The chief’s youngest wife showed him the room. He didn’t understand a word of what she said. He hadn’t understood anything of what he had been through that day. It was as if he had been in a dream and someone had tied up his legs. He was relieved when the woman left.
The room was small. It had a small bed with creaking springs. It also had a red-topped centre table and an old cane chair. The air in the room was musty. It smelt ancient. It also smelt of death and rituals. He threw open the windows. Fresh air and oblique light came in. Cobwebs clung in high corners of the ceiling.
Omovo was so exhausted that as he stared out of the window he suddenly found himself wandering down a corridor. After a while he realised he was lost. As he wandered aimlessly he passed an ordinary blue door. Through its opening he heard the most intensely beautiful music. He had seen lights swirling within, lights of violet and silver. It was only after he had gone past the door that he realised how blissful the music and the vision beyond had made him feel. He had glimpsed something quite magical and the door had turned golden in his memory. But he carried on wandering. He couldn’t stop. He didn’t know how. He felt restless and incomplete. He felt he had cheated himself of something. The years passed. He wandered through strange towns down whose streets slaves were dragged screaming, towns with old seaports, towns where the fishermen cast out their nets and threw the fishes back in to the sea. He passed cities of ancient rocks, where sacrificial victims sang before they accompanied kings to their deep ancestral graves. He travelled through places where the populace dug the earth for gold and where the elite ate the gold, trampled on it, burnt it, made clothes out of it, sold it to strangers across the seas for mirrors and bitter coffee, places where the young went around hungry and confused, where women bore thirty children and chased headless chickens. And with the passing years he hungered more for the beauty that lay beyond the blue door, he yearned for the room. He went back to seek for it and met an old woman who was dumb. She made a sign to him and he followed her. But then things changed and he lost sight of the woman and got distracted by a market place so vast that the deeper he went into it the bigger it became. The road closed up behind him. He got distracted by strange animals, ostriches with the eyes of owls, sheep with the heads of hyenas, and green cats with eyes of blazing silver. He saw beggars with dramatic deformities. Some were like contortionists permanently set in their moulds. He saw legless magicians, armless musicians in dark glasses who played their instruments with their teeth.
Through all this he was occasionally and unbearably haunted by the blue door and its undiscovered interiors, by the bliss he had experienced. And when as an older man he managed to free himself from the familiar distractions, he sought the room afresh. He wandered many years. He wandered through earthly music of sensual delights, through bars where the drinks were free and addictive, through images of the past. In one city he saw Ifeyiwa and when at a closed-off road he finally caught up with her – she turned into a shadow and melted through the walls. Lost in the city, he spent his time listening to the colourful tales of old men and pirates, who told him of circuses that floated on seas, of bazaars in the air, of towns that reincarnate in different places through time. The old men died, the pirates answered the call of salt-sprays. He followed the pirates and noticed that they got on ships which never set out across the seas.
Time accelerated. His yearning turned to bitterness. The years became deserts. Maggots ate at him. Flies clung to his honeyed brows. Crows followed him patiently. And then on the day he discovered that he had become an old man he found the corridor. As he went along, it multiplied. The floor shone like a blue mirror. His eyes had grown tired. His feet erupted with blisters and boils. Confused, infirm, increasingly blind, it occurred to him that he was now a spirit, that he was joining the dead. He had begun to be overcome by a nauseating panic when, in the distance, he saw the door. A strange dawn shone through its golden crack. The flies had left his honeyed brows. The crows had gone. He felt both too heavy and too light. The door started coming towards him. He heard the music of unbearable bliss. The illumination from the door’s opening got intolerably phosphorescent the closer it came. He woke up before the door opened its terrible splendours to him. He woke up scared. The sun burnt on his face. Outside the birds twittered. He lay on the bed disturbed. All through that day and for many years afterwards the disturbance remained. He had been asleep for eighteen hours.
The chief called by the room that afternoon. He looked two hundred years old. He had the face of ancient masks, wrinkled, ravaged with age, stamped with power. He had beads round his neck, he wore a faded duck-tail shirt over a baggy pair of trousers, and had on rubber shoes. He bore a large fan of eagle feathers in one hand and a walking stick in the other. He came with two of his servants. The chief didn’t sit down and didn’t stay long. Omovo knew he was dying. Omovo listened intently to his heavily accented Yoruba. And as he listened he felt things stirring within him.
In the evening one of the chief’s sons came to show Omovo the bathroom and where he could get the things he might need. He informed Omovo that feeding was included in the rent. The chief’s son attended the local secondary school. He had sensual lips, fine marks on his forehead, and his eyes were full of mirth and brightness. He wore khaki shorts and a blue check shirt. He said:
‘My name is Ayo. My father told me you would be staying here for some time. I will be bringing your food. You are a painter? They teach us art at school, but we have a bad teacher. I am in Class Four now. I like physics and maths. Have you finished secondary school?’
Omovo liked him immediately.
Night fell. Alone in the room, Omovo listened to the sounds of the town. The sounds were of a kind he had almost forgotten. He listened to them with a hungry rapture and felt the secret awakening of countless sensations. He listened to the wind and sea, to human voices that seemed to have minimal undertones of tension, to the children playing hide and seek, to the elders playing ayo and telling stories, to mothers settling quarrels. He list
ened to girls whispering with secret lovers. They made the darkness alive with their tiny peals of mischief. He listened to the dogs, the goats, and the birds. He watched the moon, bold in the sky, with clouds sailing across its face. The sounds drew him back to a period of magic twilights. He was happy that night, but he didn’t sleep well.
Ayo took him to his favourite parts of the beach. Omovo watched the lights on the sea, watched the shimmering waters, the lights turning delicately into intimations of rainbow through the spray. He was overwhelmed with the freshness of the air, overcome with clarity. The sea glittered in the dying lights of the evening. He watched the floating clumps of seaweed and listened to the distant songs of fishermen returning from their day’s work. The sky turned grey, the sea turned brown. The lights of the town converged above it like a collective halo of red and grey. Sensing that Omovo wanted to be alone, Ayo slipped away and left him enraptured in his contemplation.
The days came, were heightened, went, and were lost. Omovo, drenched in sunlight, roamed the beaches. He roamed the bushpaths. He paced up and down his room. He was restless. He felt vaguely aware that different things in him were coming together in images of clarity and terror. He felt strange energies ready to burst in him. But the coming together of things within eluded him. He watched, listened, waited. The days crept away, leaving his life-wish unrealised.
On the third day there was a blackout. In the darkness, fighting off the mosquitoes, he suddenly remembered a moment from his childhood. During the civil war, federal soldiers had been stamping through the town hunting out the Igbo people. They went to shops and kiosks owned by Igbos, broke their way in, dragged them out, and took them away. Sometimes particular townspeople, who had grudges against particular Igbos, gave away their hiding places. Often the townspeople took it upon themselves to do the job of the federal soldiers for them. It was a sick time. That day the soldiers had stormed into the beer parlour next door. Everyone in the street knew an Igbo undergraduate had been hiding there under the protection of a prostitute. When the soldiers went in the undergraduate ran out. The women screamed. The young man ran into the street shouting: ‘Chineke! Chineke!’