by Ben Okri
‘I will do it soon.’
‘Will it be as good as the Mona Lisa?’
‘Do you have anything to smile enigmatically about?’
‘Yes. You,’ she said.
They passed the rusted junk of a car by the roadside. There was a patch of dust-covered bushes just after it. Palm trees stood tall in a depression. Next to the trees was an expansive clearing where a building was being erected. In the distance a tailback was forming. A sudden wind blew and Omovo’s shirt lapels flapped. Ifeyiwa’s blouse billowed. In a moment the wind was gone, and there followed a tiny stillness.
‘I will do the painting, I promise.’
‘Okay. You know, it’s a long time since you did some real work.’
‘Yes.’
‘The rainy season is nearly over now. Things will get better for you.’
‘I’m happy about my drawing.’
‘I’m happy for you. You have your art. I don’t have anything. Except, maybe, you.’
‘Tuwo warned me yesterday. I don’t know why. He said I should be careful, especially of married girls.’
‘He’s jealous.’
‘Does he know we see each other?’
‘I don’t know. He went after my girlfriend, Julie, the one I went to evening class with. Then he wrote me a note that he wants to see me. He has been secretly after me for a long time. He’s jealous, that’s all.’
‘What’s his problem anyway?’
‘He is my husband’s friend. They sometimes drink together and talk of women and gossip about other things. Let’s not talk about them.’
‘Yes.’
‘You know, I saw him... no, I shouldn’t tell you.’
‘Why not? Tell me.’
‘Well... I saw him with your father’s wife, Blackie. They were walking together one night at Amukoko.’
‘My father’s wife used to know Tuwo. They lived in the same street before.’
‘Let’s not talk about them.’
‘Yes.’
‘Omovo?’
‘Yes?’
There was a silence in which she stopped suddenly and held his hands. Her eyes were ardent in their liquid brightness. Omovo thought: ‘Can I find my way out of those eyes?’
‘I don’t belong here,’ she said. A certain anguish had come over her face. Omovo touched her cheeks.
‘Ever since I was taken from home I don’t belong anywhere any more. I hate my husband and I hate this life my family forced me into.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’ Omovo’s voice was husky. He looked at her. Her face was lean, pretty, a clear coffee-brown. Her eyebrows were neat black lines. She had small firm lips and a fine nose. But it was her eyes that moved things in him. They were intelligent and hopeful. They had mysterious depths to them. He looked into her eyes and he again felt that wonderful and dangerous something rise within him.
An army lorry drove slowly past. There were many soldiers on the back. They all carried weapons. They shouted and sang raucously. Their presence introduced something violent into the atmosphere. The tailback had built up, and the army lorry came to a stop. When Omovo and Ifeyiwa went past one of the soldiers made a comment and pointed at them. The others stared and then laughed. Ifeyiwa felt for Omovo’s hand and drew closer to him.
‘Ifeyiwa.’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing. Don’t worry.’
The sky was clear and melancholy. The evening light was gay on the dusty green leaves of the bushes. A soft moaning wind that whispered of rain came and then went. The tailback eased and the army lorry drove on. The noise of the soldiers faded into the distance. There were heavy diesel fumes in the air.
‘Let’s go back home,’ Omovo said finally. They turned around and walked back in silence. When they got near the mechanic’s workshop where she had met him, she said quietly:
‘I’ll go first. You take another route.’
He nodded and stared into her eyes.
‘I am happy.’
‘You’d better be going. He must be waiting angrily for you.’
‘I am happy,’ she said again.
Omovo smiled. ‘So am I. Really. I’m just worried about other things.’
‘Will I see the drawing afterwards?’
‘Yes. I’ll show it to you. I have always done that.’
She smiled sweetly. She looked her seventeen years. But her eyes were piercing. He kissed her gently on the lips and then held her close to him.
‘I am happy you came. I’m happy I could tell you about my dream.’
‘I’m happy too.’
She turned and half ran, half skipped, in that fashion of hers, down the path. When he looked again she had vanished behind the new buildings that were being erected in the area.
He turned and walked slowly down the Badagry Road. He stared but noted nothing. He tried to think of the drawing he had done. But he knew he was really thinking of Ifeyiwa and her husband and of many other silent things.
4
The first thing he became aware of was that his drawing was missing. He had come into the room with a new desire to look at it. He wanted to show it to Ifeyiwa, who would be coming round to the backyard later. He found it refreshing to see his work through her eyes.
He looked at the table where he had last put it and then he looked underneath, thinking that it had fallen down. It wasn’t there. He soon worked himself into a frenzy: he ransacked the things on the table, turned over his mattress, looked under the faded linoleum, leafed through his sketchbooks, and went through his pockets. But he still couldn’t find it. He sat back on the bed and took a deep breath. He tried to remember. He began to sweat.
He remembered finishing the drawing. He remembered that he went to the toilet, came back, put the drawing on the table and then rested it against the wall. That was all. His forehead throbbed. He got up and searched again beneath the table where he kept his drawings and the discarded jujus, the tortoise shells, the broken combs and the other curious objects with which he practised sketching. And then he looked under the bed, where he kept some of his paintings in a large polythene covering. He opened the drawer and scattered the things in it. He came across his mass of hair that he had kept in a cellophane wrapping. He stared at it for a long time, his mind twisting into all kinds of shapes. Then he put it back. Confused and fatigued, his head throbbed again. He had been searching for thirty minutes.
And then he remembered the young man with the hungry eyes who asked him if he would sell the drawing. He remembered the prematurely wrinkled face, and the unspoken menace. Omovo was flooded with a numbing sense of loss. Many years later he would walk into a bookshop and come upon a bestselling book written by an Englishman on the African condition. His long-lost drawing would stare back at him, transfigured by time, from the cover. The name of the artist was – Anonymous.
After a while of sitting in his sorrow he got up and went to the living room. The old pictures stared down at him from the drab walls. There was nobody around. It occurred to him to ask his father if he had seen the drawing. The idea died naturally. He knew he couldn’t even ask. He thought: ‘Maybe someone sneaked into the house and stole it. That hungry young man, perhaps.’ But still it didn’t make sense. He considered many other maybes and came around to thinking that his father might have taken it to look at in private. After all, when Omovo was much younger it was his father who had kindled his interest in art, and he liked going over his work alone. But Omovo knew all that belonged to the faraway place called childhood. The emotions in the scattered family had become too complicated for such sentimental gestures.
But as Omovo sat there, in the stiff-backed chair, in the spare and musty sitting room, a sentimental doubt festered.
His father’s yellow-painted door with its peeling skins of paint was slightly ajar. He wanted to knock when he heard sounds from within. He stopped and looked.
On the bed his father, naked and hairy and lean, made love to Blackie. There was certain violence about his thrus
ting motions and Blackie moaned and responded beneath him. Omovo, stunned, knew that he had seen something he should not have seen. It had all happened so unexpectedly. Then he heard his father give a long, pathetic wail and Omovo fancied that he heard his dead mother’s name in that wail. Omovo gave a short, strangled gasp. The moaning stopped, the motions stopped, the other sounds stopped somewhere in space.
Omovo tiptoed nervously back to his room. He sat on the bed and stared at the wall. A deep surf of loneliness swept over him and he recalled something else he had innocently witnessed. He was nine. He was ill at the time. His father had asked him to come and sleep in his room. At night he woke up and found that his father was not beside him. The adjacent door leading to his mother’s room was open. His father was making love to his mother. It was strange to see them doing it, and they seemed to him like people he didn’t know, but somehow he could understand. He did not feel deserted. He did not feel he had done wrong. He turned away and fell asleep. They lived in Yaba then and things were different. But what he had accidently witnessed now was disturbing. His mother’s name, which he thought that he had heard, swam around in his head like a crazed goldfish.
He heard heavy footsteps. Someone cursed and grumbled. The door to his father’s room was slammed shut. The key was fumblingly turned. And then there was a long silence.
He stared blankly at the soot-spirals on the ceiling. It was many moments later before he realised that the electricity board had again, quite arbitrarily, cut off the lights. He felt the trapped heat rising under his skin. The darkness of the high corners pressed on him. Mosquitoes descended on his head as if they each had a private grudge. He found release in an uncomfortable sleep. Omovo had just emerged from a long dry season, and his first real fruit had already been violated.
He woke up deep in the night, irritated by the mosquitoes. He was aware of the unnatural silence. As he stared towards the window the shapes in the room emerged from the amorphous, crowding darkness. They resolved themselves into the white ceiling, the clothes rack, and the large snail shells hanging from corners of the room, the exotic shapes of broken calabashes, and favourite paintings.
And as he got used to that ringing quality of silence other things composed themselves in his mind. He didn’t want them to become definite. An expanded sense of loss filtered through his inner silence.
Then there was a noise coming from the sitting room. Separate noises. The scraping of a chair. Footfalls. Pacing. A sudden indistinct soliloquy. A deep drag on a cigarette. A soft sibilant exhalation. Then another silence. Omovo turned over on the bed. The light was on in the sitting room. Omovo knew: the man was having another bout of insomnia.
Omovo got out of bed, put on his khaki overalls, and went to the sitting room. His father was now at the dining table. His head was bent over a pile of documents. He wore a singlet over the large white bed sheet he had wrapped around his waist. The light fell on one side of his face. The other side was in darkness. His forehead was creased in cracks and wrinkles. The eye that was visible was red-veined and sunken. He looked desolate sitting like that in the semi-darkness. He turned his head slightly when Omovo came out of his room.
‘Are you okay, Dad?’
‘Yes. I can’t sleep. It’s nothing. It often happens to big men.’
Omovo lingered. He hoped that his father would warm to his presence. Omovo remembered how his father used to talk gently to him, how they would both be awake at night when everyone was asleep, and how he sometimes told stories of what happened in the ‘olden days’. But his father stayed silent. Then he took a drag on his cigarette, and turned back to the documents on the table.
Omovo went outside. The compound was quiet. There were one or two lights on in the verandah. A strong wind blew through the compound that made him aware of his shorn head and flapped the clothes that were hanging on washing lines in front of the rooms. As he went to the backyard his footsteps ricocheted through the compound and magnified in his brain. The communal bathroom was dark, smelly, sinister. In the oppressive space of the slimy walls, with their cracks and shadows, he experienced something familiar. He looked upwards and again confronted the terrifying mass of cobwebs. The roof was hardly visible. When he had urinated he went to the front of the compound. He opened the wrought-iron gate. Its hinges cranked and groaned in the night.
He stood in front of the building and let the cool wind run through him. It had been so hot in the room. Now it was so cool. He stared at the sky. It was a dark blue coverlet full of holes. The ghetto was quiet. One or two characters stumbled down the deserted street. A few front lights, candle-dull, shone from the silent bungalows. Stalls stood in front of various houses. The usually noisy hotel was shut and drenched in darkness. Omovo scanned the corrugated zinc roofs of the buildings and then he looked towards Ifeyiwa’s house. The front light was dull but Omovo could make out a figure sitting on the door ledge. He wondered if it was Ifeyiwa. He felt the blood rise to his face, and a tremor pass through him. Between him and that human being was the dark filthy street. The darkness between them was almost tactile. It was a fluid presence, separate from and yet a part of everything. Omovo stood still for the long moment during which the figure slapped its thigh, stood up, paced the cement platform and then sat down again. The figure raised its hands skywards and then brought them down.
Soon afterwards the main door opened and a man wearing a wrapper came out. He shouted something that was lost in the wind. Then he dragged the figure into the house.
Omovo stared at the door for a long time. The night became cold and the dark coverlet of the sky pressed in on his skull. The pool of scum gave off a bad smell. The wrought-iron gate cranked and groaned. His footsteps ricocheted through the compound and through his skull.
Back in his room he got out his paintboxes, palette, and easel. He tried not to think of his lost drawing. He began to paint. The room was stuffy and hot. The mosquitoes whined and stung him in vulnerable places. He worked with unswerving determination. He caressed the white canvas with brush strokes of a deep muddy green. Then he punctuated the green tide with browns, greys and reds. Out of all this he painted a snot-coloured scumpool full of portentous shapes and heads with glittering, dislocated eyes. He knew what he wanted to do and was happy.
He worked at the painting, cleaned off a bit, retouched an edge, washed off some aspect, started a fresh canvas, and decided that the first one was appropriate. As he continued he thought he heard his father’s footsteps near the door. He stopped working to listen. The silence was broken now and again by the whining insinuation of a mosquito. Omovo tried to imagine what his father was doing or thinking outside his door. A moment later he heard footsteps move towards the sitting room. An incoherent emotion swept over him.
He returned to his painting. He worked intently, unaware of the passing time. He was surprised when on looking towards the window he saw the shy fingers of light prising through the yellow curtains. Then he suddenly felt tired and old. His eyes burnt with fatigue. His body smarted and itched where the mosquitoes had stung him. He was drenched in his own stale sweat.
When he finished with the night’s labours he took up a pencil and wrote ‘Drift’ on the bottom part of the canvas. He signed his name (even though well aware that he would still have to re-work it) and turned the painting to face the wall. He cleared up the room and cleaned away the familiar stains of paint. The paint had got everywhere.
When he made for the backyard he saw his father asleep on the cushion chair. His legs were sprawled and his head was slumped forward. Omovo stood there at the doorway, and he felt sorry for his father. Then he remembered many other things and he did not feel quite so sorry any more. At the backyard he washed his paint-stained hands with kerosene and turpentine and then had a light shower. When he came back to his room he drew aside the curtains. He felt trapped by his own emotions and felt very empty and dried up. Having nothing better to do, he searched around for his missing drawing. He gave it up. Then he rubbed some Vaseline
on his parched hands and got back into bed.
He was studying a mass of accumulating cobwebs, which had festooned a high corner of the room, when sleep closed in gently upon him like the silent immensity of the sky.
The following week he worked furiously to complete the painting. When he finished it, however, he was uncertain and a little unsure of what he had created. It seemed to him strange and at the same time familiar. He knew, wordlessly, what he had attempted. He walked round the large green scumpool a thousand times. He had smelt its warm, nauseous stench and had stared at it as if hidden in its green surface lay the answer to a perennial riddle. He was also a little afraid of the uncharted things that had happened within him: the obscure, the foul correlatives which had been released on the canvas – snot-coloured, viscous, and unsettling.
On Tuesday evening, Omovo went to Dr Okocha’s workshed. It was shut. Freshly painted signboards leaned against the door. There was a large faded painting on the door. It was of a brooding green eye, with a black pupil and a gathering red teardrop. It stared all-seeingly at the teeming streets and back into its own darkness.
The week passed tortuously for Omovo. Evening after evening, when going out to ‘take fresh air’ he would lock his room door. The other loss still rankled. On Thursday evening he stood at the house-front playing with the children when the chief assistant deputy bachelor sidled up to him. That was what they called him because he was the oldest bachelor in the compound. He was a gaunt, dry-chested, hatchet-faced Igbo man in his early forties, who owned a small shop in the city centre where he sold all kinds of provisions.
‘Painter boy, how now?’
Omovo was swinging around a scruffy little child and when he saw the chief assistant deputy bachelor he dropped the boy, touched him on the head and told him to go and play with the other kids.
‘My name is not painter boy, you know.’
‘Okay now, okay. Anyway, how your body?’
‘Fine. What about you?’