by Ben Okri
He paused in his rhetoric, exhausted, and breathed in deeply. He had worn himself out. It was too much for Omovo. He seemed to be in a terrible dream. He felt he had to act, to make a movement.
‘What’s all this, Dad?’ he said, stepping forward. But his father turned to him and lashed out with the belt. It caught Omovo on the back. Omovo twisted, the pain searing through him.
‘Get away, you small fool! Or do you want to follow your brothers as well?’
Mist formed in Omovo’s eyes. And through the mist everything seemed to be gyrating. Omovo blinked and the mist cleared. Umeh looked at Omovo with brooding and vacant eyes. Okur stood still, his bearing as strategic as ever. Blackie continued to blow the husks from the rice. The compound people were still at the window and at the door. They seemed excited by the latest scene in the family drama.
Omovo shut his eyes and said a silent prayer. He prayed that it was all a dream, and that harmony would be restored. If a word existed, potent like mystic syllables, that he could utter to save the disintegration of the family, he would have given anything to know it and to be able to voice it. When he opened his eyes, he was scorched by the indifference of reality.
He heard Umeh say: ‘I’m going, old man. I hope you will find happiness with yourself when I am gone.’
Then Umeh picked up his travelling bag and pushed past his father. At the doorway he screamed obscenities at the people gathered round the window. Then his heavy footsteps were heard leaving the compound.
‘You can go,’ Omovo heard his father say.
Before he could do anything, Okur suddenly pulled out his own bag, which had been hidden under the dining table. He picked up the bag and moved towards his father. Omovo felt himself swaying in the sheer inexorable force of events.
‘If Umeh goes, I go,’ Okur said, towering over his father.
Tension hung over the room like a shroud of immense gloom. Nobody moved. Then their father took a deep breath. His neck stiffened. His chest expanded. Then he looked around, as if everyone present were crucial to the next thing he was going to say. Okur moved towards the door. Their father grimaced. Omovo could imagine him saying in a drinking session, much later: ‘I don’t take nonsense from anybody. I turned them out. Just like that.’ Then, with heaviness and exhaustion in his voice, he said:
‘If you want to follow your brother into madness, then you can follow him. You two have been bad children to me. It’s all a waste.’
Then he went, unsteadily, towards the sprawled chair. He stood it up straight, slumped onto it and took a long drink directly from the bottle of ogogoro.
Omovo looked up and saw the old framed photographs on the wall. In one of them his father, bearing a fan, his expression dignified, stared proudly down at the sitting room. Something passed through Omovo. He shuddered at its irrevocability. He felt hollow with the shared guilt, the disembodied sorrow. Okur came over to him and, with a hand on his shoulder, said:
‘Take it easy, little brother. What happened had to happen. We shall seek the true meaning of our lives. This is a dream we might wake up from one day.’
A moment later, Omovo was alone. The hand had left his shoulder. It had happened. It had happened.
The compound people, having witnessed the end of the drama, went back to their various duties. The strangers left. The children ran up and down the corridor, playing. Omovo’s father drank his ogogoro. His eyes were bloodshot and dazed. Blackie disappeared into the kitchen. Only the faint rattle of shuffled rice grains could be heard. Omovo went to the door and looked outside. The corridor was deserted. It was difficult to believe that a moment before their door had been crowded. The damage had been done and life had resumed its altered course. Nothing seemed to be real.
He went to the house front. The area bustled. Pulsating noises sounded from everywhere. The scumpool was green and covered with filth. People streamed past. Children played. Girls came to buy water. A hawker of roasted groundnuts, dressed in tattered clothes, went past, calling ‘Ele ekpa re-o!’ in a sweet high-pitched voice. He could not see his brothers anywhere in the commotion. He ran towards the garage. He still could not find them. He came back home, stood on the cement platform, his back against the wall, and shut his eyes. When he opened them he looked up at the tranquil expanse of sky. He thought: ‘It’s a dream from which we might wake up one day.’ He hoped that he would not wake up too late, when the nightmare had gone too far, when nothing could be done any more.
After that day his father took to drinking heavily. Omovo fell deeper into painting. It was once a childhood hobby. After his mother’s death it became a world full of his bizarre feelings. With the departure of his brothers it became a passion. It became a way to explore the hidden meanings of his life and to come to terms with the miasmic landscapes about him. Painting became a part of his response to life: a personal and public prism.
3
Omovo took in the sounds and activities of the compound. Children in varying stages of nakedness ran up and down the corridor. Their shrill voices filled the air. They liked him because he was generous to them. He liked the children as well. But as they ran up and down they ignored him, as if they sensed the mood of his dark thoughts which they could not share.
Omovo felt far away from the bustle around him. He looked up through the gap left by the eaves of the zinc roofs. Against the unobtrusive sky, his thoughts formed themselves. Something warmed within him. He smiled. His face began to glow. The children playing around must have sensed this brightening, for some of them soon gathered around him.
‘Brother Omovo, give us money. We wan buy groundnut,’ they said, as if they had rehearsed the request.
He smiled at them. It pleased him to hear them call him ‘Brother Omovo’ in chorus.
‘Brother Omovo, give us five kobo, you hear?’
His hand moved to his breast pocket. He felt in a playful mood. He drew back his hand and looked at them in pretended severity. The children fell silent. Omovo crossed his eyes. The children laughed. Then he bent down and said:
‘I go give una money if una fit do arithmetics.’
The children nodded. Omovo found himself staring at the protruding stomach of a little girl. She had a yellow-brown complexion. A boy with a head like a pear broke the silence.
‘Oya now. Give us the arithmetic.’
Omovo turned to the boy. ‘Okay, you, wetin be three times seven?’
The boy counted with his dirty fingers, racking his brain. ‘I don get am!’ he soon announced. ‘Na twenty one! Oya where di money?’
Omovo gave the children twenty-one kobos. They cheered, as if with one voice, and ran out of the compound to buy items of their fancy. As they went one of the children shouted: ‘Shine-shine head’ at him. He could not tell which one it was and he smiled after them forbearingly.
He turned his gaze upwards at the sky. With his eyes wide open he tried to imagine objects. He tried to imagine darkness. He couldn’t. Then, shutting his eyes, he tried to imagine trees. He could sense the remembered shape of trees, but he could not see them in their solidity. He found that, as always, he had to create the image within him; he had to bring it into being as if he were painting it internally. When he opened his eyes he felt serene.
With his serenity he tried thinking about the painting he had resolved to do. But the idea was too abstract, and he felt he was deceiving himself in some way. He was aware that there was something he wasn’t facing. He wasn’t sure what it was. He began to think about the concrete basis of all ideas, and about the long silent phases it had taken him to trap the scumscape on canvas, when his mind clouded.
Life outside began to intrude. A baby cried, a husband and wife quarrelled publicly, and there was a hiss of food being fried. A radiogram blared traditional music. A woman demanded to know, in a loud voice, whose baby had excreted on her doorstep. A man with a wide mouth and kola-nut-stained teeth called to his children with merciless repetition. And there were the constant noises of passers-by. The cac
ophony was a vibrant assault on his senses.
His mind wandered amidst the babel. Then he came up with the notion of trying not to hear the noises. He concentrated on a television aerial on the roof. For a moment he heard nothing. When he bent his mind to affirm whether he was really hearing nothing, he began to hear the tumultuous sounds of the world. He smiled. He began to concentrate on space, on the gap between the roof and sky. He was shifting the focus of his eyes when the clarity of her voice penetrated his consciousness.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
It was Ifeyiwa.
‘Omovo, why are you staring like that?’
Her voice was soft. He tried to hold her voice in his mind. But it had been there, and it was gone. She looked at him quizzically.
‘Omovo, did you hear me?’
‘Yes, yes.’
He became suddenly aware that she was close to him. She held a bucket full of water in her hand. He felt the heat from her exerted body. A warm and earthy smell came from her, filling him with remembered passion. Her eyes, clear, and white brown, were widened as though in wonder. She had a blue scarf about her head, framing her face. The expression on her face excited him. He swarmed with uneasiness. He became conscious that the compound people were staring.
Imitating the stance of older women, Ifeyiwa said: ‘What does a young man like you have to think about? You have no wife, no children, so why do you have to keep staring at the sky?’
She smiled. Omovo, smiling back, said: ‘It’s good to hear you teasing me.’
She drew closer to him. Her breasts heaved with sensuous dignity, rising and falling, as if she had difficulty in breathing. They carved provocative shapes on her simple blouse. Omovo’s eyes could not avoid being drawn to them.
‘I was just thinking about my brothers. I had a letter from Okur this morning.’
Ifeyiwa did not know Omovo’s brothers. What she had come to know had been picked up, sifted from gossip and from what he had told her. Some time ago, in the backyard, he had shown her photographs of them. Since then he spoke about them to her as if she had met them in the flesh.
They were both silent. The cocoon they had woven about themselves did not protect them from the compound. People jostled past, quarrelling, shouting, cursing. Music blared through open windows. Children cried. Some of the compound men glanced somewhat enviously at the two of them. The men winked when they caught Omovo’s eye. The air was shot through with curiosity and conspiracy.
Ifeyiwa’s eyes swept round the compound. Her posture became defiant. Her eyes hardened. She stared at a spot of paint in the hollow of Omovo’s neck. He became uneasy. He felt the eyes of the compound boring into them. He could feel himself and Ifeyiwa becoming a theme of the next gossip session.
‘Have you had trouble with Blackie again?’
He looked at her, thinking: ‘How is she able to sense these things so accurately?’
‘Just a little misunderstanding,’ he said.
There was silence. He continued: ‘Don’t you think you should be going with the water now? He might be waiting for you.’
Her face underwent a transformation. It changed from brightness into hardness, became a mask. Omovo, agitated, said: ‘No... I... I didn’t mean...’
‘It’s all right,’ she said, her voice cool. Her face was expressionless. Then her lips began to tremble. In that moment he glimpsed her dilemmas and her terrors. As he watched her he remembered her dream. The images passed through his mind and mingled with elements of his own dreams. He thought: ‘What a love of life she has. What a gift!’
‘Omovo,’ she said, gently.
He nodded. Her face lightened. He smiled. He knew.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, let’s meet afterwards. You have something to tell me.’
Her eyes lit up. He went on. ‘And thank you for washing my clothes. It’s really lovely of you.’
‘I like doing it.’
‘But you are spoiling me.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I’m so lazy. I’m ashamed that I keep leaving my clothes to soak in the backyard.’
‘I’d like to do more for you.’
‘But you wash them so clean.’
‘They could be cleaner.’ After a short silence, she said: ‘So we will meet later in the evening.’
He nodded.
‘How did you know that’s what I wanted to ask?’
‘I wonder,’ he said, not without an air of mystery. He was in a fine mood. There wasn’t a cloud within him. He fairly trembled with the promise of the moment. He felt that he had unexpectedly touched a pulse of sweet and vibrant life.
‘So where shall we meet?’ she asked, bending down to pick up the bucket.
‘Don’t worry. I will be outside. When you see me just start walking. I will follow.’
She lifted the aluminium bucket. Her eyes shone. ‘Take it easy, Omovo. You make me worry when you look at the sky that way.’
She started to move. Then she came back. With her eyes fixed on his, she said: ‘That was exactly what my elder brother used to do before he killed himself.’
Then she left the compound. She strained with the bucket. Water spilt over and left splashes in her trail. He watched her as she went through the gate, and round the water tanks that gleamed outside. He noticed the sweat on her neck. Her blouse was stuck to her back. Still full of sadness in the last thing she had said, he felt a little guilty that he had been watching the shape of her gently moving backside.
When she disappeared from sight he noticed that Tuwo had been staring at him. When their eyes met, Tuwo waved. Omovo nodded. Tuwo always seemed to be following him. Whenever he was with Ifeyiwa in the backyard Tuwo would keep turning up for one reason or another. He would talk to Ifeyiwa, he would ask after her husband, and was generally irritating.
Tuwo had an infamous reputation with the women of the compound. He was always involved with someone’s wife, or daughter, or sister. The compound men were wary of him in this respect. He had been married once. But the woman, stronger than he was, very nearly ruined him, nearly ‘scraped his heada’, as they say.
Omovo noticed that the men were beginning their fortnightly cleaning of the compound. They made clanging noises with buckets and shovels. They waved ropes around and brandished cutlasses. They sang traditional work songs and performed impromptu barefoot dances. They stopped outside Tuwo’s room and shouted at him to come and join in the cleaning. They sang his numerous nicknames. His face darkened. He got up, went inside, and came out wearing a long pair of dirty khaki shorts, which greatly amused the men.
‘Hey!’ one of them exclaimed. ‘Were you a headmaster in the olden days?’
The other men laughed. One of them pulled at the long flaring shorts.
‘Where did you get dis colonial short man’s trouser?’ said the chief assistant deputy bachelor.
‘His grandfather gave it to him.’
The men laughed again.
‘I bought it at a jumbo sale in England,’ Tuwo replied with unassailable dignity.
‘He doesn’t even know where the airport is,’ someone said, and the men fell about in robust laughter, slapping their thighs, tears rolling down their faces.
Soon the laughter died down and they turned to the serious business of cleaning. The cleaning day had a story of its own. It began when the women revolted against having to do all the dirty jobs in the compound, sweeping the corridor and the backyard, unblocking the bathroom drainholes, cleaning out the toilets. They had a meeting and decided to ask the men either to contribute to the work or to pay them for their labours. But the men laughed at the idea. It was simply inconceivable. The next Saturday, however, the women refused to do any cleaning. The bathroom began to stink. The water that couldn’t flow from the bathroom into the gutter soon flowed through the compound and gave off an infernal smell. The toilet became unusable. The men were furious. They too held a meeting and came up with the decision to prove that they could do the jobs without g
rumbling or asking to be paid. They did, and it became a compound tradition. It also became a social event. Every second Saturday, while they cleaned up, they told one another outrageous jokes and improbable stories, they made a lot of noise, they chattered and laughed and sorted out the little quarrels of the week. And after the cleaning was over one of the men would invite the others to his room for an evening’s session of drinking and mantalk.
Omovo watched the men and knew that they would be coming to rouse his father next. They just might draft him too, if the mood took them. He came down from the wall and ducked into the sitting room. He heard one of the men say: ‘Hey painter, are you running away?’
Omovo fled into his room and locked the door behind him. He heard the noises of the men as they clanged the cutlasses against the buckets, and called his father, who was the ‘captain’ of the compound, to come out and join them. Blackie went outside and they teased her with insinuations:
‘So it’s you who doesn’t allow our captain to come out, eh?’ said one.
‘You and your husband can do the thing at night, habah!’
Blackie laughed and said she would go and get her husband. Soon he joined them and they carried their noises with them to the backyard.
Omovo felt relatively peaceful. He sat down on the only chair in the room and began to contemplate his life. Where was he going? Where was this mixed-up road leading him? His life seemed aimless. He had nothing to show for his existence. He had done well at school. But just when he was about to sit for his school certificate his father fell on hard times and couldn’t pay the school fees. What made it worse was that he kept deceiving Omovo’s mother. He said there were no problems, that he had seen to everything. The principal of Omovo’s school was a bald, severe Igbo man. He prevented Omovo from sitting six papers in the finals, because the fees hadn’t been paid. The principal had long concluded that all the students of the school, without exception, were rotten, and that Omovo must have ‘squashed’ his fees on a spending spree, or lost them gambling. Omovo’s result was incomplete. The final grade was failure. All he needed was a chance. But the chance never came. With his mother’s death his whole life turned into a maze of insecurities.