by Ben Okri
‘Omovo, what’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
Then he reached out, took her hands and pulled her to him. He held her as if he didn’t want her ever to go away. He held her for a long time. It was his way of dispelling his sense of terror. Omovo held her so tightly she had difficulty breathing. He soaked in the full reality of her being, breathed in the lightness of her perfume and the earthy aroma of her body. He felt her hair and touched her face and her arms as if he had never touched her before. It seemed the only way to drive the horrible transposition from his mind.
After he got over the shock of seeing the dead girl on Ifeyiwa’s face, he said: ‘Let’s go. It’s so dark under this tree.’
The real reason that he wanted to go was because he suddenly couldn’t remember what the dead girl looked like.
They made their way home silently. Ifeyiwa led them back through a maze of streets, unfinished roads, dirt-tracks, bushpaths and short cuts. They came to the stall of a fruit-seller. The stall-owner was a woman. She was asleep and her head was resting on her basin of oranges. Ifeyiwa bought some tangerines. As they paid the wind blew out the oil lamp.
‘It’s going to rain,’ the woman said, and hurriedly began to pack her things.
When they got to the street where the party was taking place a strong wind blew over the chairs and paper plates. Omovo watched as a businessman draped in a glowing white agbada, with elegant scarifications on his fat face, sprayed money on the women who danced. The more the women trembled their enormous backsides to the music the more money the businessman plastered on them. The wind blew some of the Naira notes into the air and the children ran to catch them, screaming. The musicians blasted out their praise-songs through the loudspeakers. Then quite suddenly the rain began to pelt down. The party became riotous with outrage. The celebrants shouted. The men in their fluttering agbadas, which the wind threatened to wrap around them completely, ran in all directions. Some of the men ran straight to their cars. Others ran into houses for protection. People stumbled over chairs and tables. The businessman who had been spraying money on the wind tripped over his voluminous clothing and fell face forward into a basin of fried goat. Children screamed everywhere. The women, with much more presence of mind, dismantled the chairs and tables, carried off basins of food and the crates of drink. The musicians hurriedly packed up their equipment, carried in the loudspeakers, and stumbled over their instruments. The chaos was extraordinary. The rain became a downpour, torrential and unrelenting. The light went out round the arena of the party.
The rain thrashed down. Ifeyiwa and Omovo began running. They ran through the wetness and found nowhere to hide, no eaves under which to shelter. They ran aimlessly. After a while Ifeyiwa stopped.
‘The mud is getting on my dress,’ she said.
They stopped running and picked their way serenely through the rain. They were soon completely wet. Omovo noticed that Ifeyiwa’s face glowed with a wonderful radiance. He held her and she stopped and looked into his eyes. Her face was wild and her eyes were intense. He kissed her. Then they began walking again. They walked through the passions of the season.
Then Ifeyiwa stopped again. Omovo looked round and realised that they had broken through the dream maze into a familiar place. They had arrived at their street. Ifeyiwa was drenched with rain. Her clothes stuck to her body and her hair dripped water. She looked oddly defiant.
‘I will always remember this,’ she said.
Omovo smiled. He felt as if he had undergone a numinous ritual. He felt as if they had passed through an invisible door which opened only in one direction.
‘What will you tell him when you get home?’
Ifeyiwa stared into his face as if she was reading a script with tiny letters.
‘Don’t worry. He went out to a meeting of his townspeople. He’ll be back late.’ She paused. Then she said: ‘I am so happy. I won’t let anyone take it from me.’
Omovo stared into the distance. Then he looked at her and said: ‘If you come round tomorrow I will draw you.’
‘I will meet you in the backyard,’ she said.
There was a half-smile on her face. Her eyes were sad. They were sad in a way that only a deformed kind of beauty can be. At first he didn’t understand the sadness. Then he noticed that the rain had washed off her mascara and eye-shadow and powder, giving her an almost ghoulish look. He touched her face. She lowered her head. When she looked up she became the girl in plain blouses and soup-stained wrappers that Omovo had always known. She looked as if she had stepped out of her enchantment, and into her reality.
‘Thanks, Omovo,’ she said simply.
Then she half walked, half ran down the drenched street. He watched her as she went past abandoned stalls, record shops, provision stores, all shut for the night. The rain had stopped falling. Calmness reigned over the land for a moment. He watched her cautiously approach the patch of bushes. He tried to see beyond the bushes but couldn’t. And as she vanished from sight, walking hurriedly, she made the darkness yellow. Omovo felt as if a gift had been snatched from him.
He stood still for a long time. Rainwater collected round his feet. There were no insects around. As he stood there, pondering the collective haze of the light above the houses, something happened. Darkness fell over everything like a mighty cloak. There had been another power failure. Disorientated by its suddenness, he shivered. It was as if the light had gone out in his head. The wind rose and the silence hummed for a moment before he plucked up enough courage to make his way home. As he neared the bushes he thought: ‘When the darkness is recent there is almost nothing to guide you.’ The compound front was empty. The men who had been talking about infidelity had all gone. He went into the compound without looking at Ifeyiwa’s house front. He did not do any painting that night.
10
When Ifeyiwa got home she was surprised to find the lights on in their room. When she went in he was just draining a tumbler that was a quarter filled with ogogoro. He had been to a meeting, but because it had ended in quarrels, and because the lights had been seized earlier in that area, he had returned sooner than expected.
He was sitting bolt upright on a chair. His eyes were raw and red. His face had darkened. He looked as if waiting for her had exhausted him. He had bags under his eyes. He looked ravaged. His hands quivered. Ifeyiwa stood at the door, uncertain of what to do. Then, without looking up, he made for the belt which had been lying on the bed. His voice was loud with barely concealed anger when he asked:
‘Ifi, where have you been?’
Words failed her. She braced herself.
‘Where have you been?’
‘I went to see my friend, Mary. On my way back the rain beat me.’
He looked up at her. His hands quivered more noticeably. ‘Why didn’t you tell me where you were going?’
‘You were out.’
‘So whenever I go out you go out, eh?’
‘No.’
There was an awful tension in the room. She stood shivering in her yellow dress. Her hair was all over the place. He looked at her a long time. It may have been because she was so well dressed, because she had worn her best clothes which he had never seen on her, because she wore her white shoes, her white scarf, and looked like a bright young girl returning from a party that he felt so bad, so excluded. She had obviously not dressed up so well on account of him. It may have been for all these reasons that he got up and shouted:
‘If you go on like this I will send you back to your wretched people! I will send you back to your miserable family! When you foolish village girls have small education dat’s how you behave, eh?’
His anger overflowed. He lashed out with the belt and caught her on the neck. She screamed, jumped sideways, and crashed into the cupboard of food. He lashed at her again. He tore the shoulders of her yellow dress. He went on whipping her until she grabbed the belt, rushed to the door, and ran out into the wet night with her clothes in tatters.
&nbs
p; ‘Run! Run outside if you like! You will sleep outside tonight,’ he shouted.
Then he went and locked the main door and the door to their room.
She stood in front of the compound. She heard the water running in the gutters. Mosquitoes assailed her. The wet wind blew through her. She was standing there when the lights were seized. At first she did not notice. Then the darkness crowded her. She saw a candle being lit in her husband’s room. She went and sat on the dirty cement platform. Her clothes stuck to her and she shivered as the wind kept blowing. She listened to the frogs croaking all over the marsh. She was staring at Omovo’s house front, wondering what he was doing, when she saw his lean silhouetted form come down the street and into his compound. If he had looked up he wouldn’t have seen her anyway. She sat in complete darkness, desolate in her torn dress and white shoes and faded perfume. Her body itched. She scratched herself absent-mindedly. And when the wind stopped blowing her head dropped. She readjusted her position and rested her head on the cradle of her arms. Then she raised her knees. She slept like a lost child that had cried itself to sleep.
An hour later the main door opened. Her husband emerged and in a half-gentle, half-angry voice he commanded her to come in. She was silent. He raised his voice and woke her. He moved towards her. She turned, saw his menacing form creeping towards her, and ran into the street. He pleaded with her to come in, dry herself and get some sleep. She moved further from him, till all he could see was her white shoes. He stayed pleading for a while. When he saw how hopeless his efforts were, when he saw that there was nothing he could say that could make her trust his desire for reconciliation, he went back in. Then he told her he was leaving the doors open so she could come in whenever she wanted.
‘Watch out for thieves,’ he said, and disappeared into the house. But she stayed out the whole night and slept on the cement platform.
11
What was it that woke him?
Was it the rush of images, of birds keening and swarming in his sleep, dark birds fighting in a trapped place, with leaves blown to frenzy all about him?
He stirred on the bed, his mind suspended between waking and nightmare. From beneath the table he heard clutching noises amongst the papers. Then several claws scratched under the bed. He got up and thought: ‘Bloody rats.’
With his awareness of daybreak myriad sounds played upon his consciousness. An alarm clock rang. Cocks crowed. He heard the swishing broom of the woman whose turn it was to sweep the compound. A baby cried insistently in the backyard. An argument between a married couple had started. From the road, through the veil of dawn, he listened to the female prophet who every morning clanged her bell and called on people to repent before the apocalypse. Shortly afterwards he heard the newspaper vendor blasting his horn and announcing the most intriguing items of the day’s news. And far away, the muezzin called the faithful to prayer.
He lay back on the bed and when he shut his eyes he remembered the events of the night before. How had he survived the intensities of that night? He didn’t know. It was when he became aware of the fan blades blowing cool air at him that he suddenly realised what had woken him up. It wasn’t the rats. The lights had been brought back. Feeling curiously happier, he thought about the previous night.
It had been a happy place – the walking, Ifeyiwa dancing, her yellow dress, and the rain. Then it became a sad place –the black-outs, the parting, the incomplete embrace. His eyes focussed and he found that he had been staring unseeing at the quote he had written on the wall: ‘Yesterday is but a dream.’
He turned over and thought about Ifeyiwa. He wondered if she had got home without any trouble. He knew how jealous, how vindictive her husband was. He had heard about the two thugs paid to beat up the photographer who, it was claimed, had attempted to seduce Ifeyiwa. The beating was so severe that the photographer, under cover of darkness, fled from the compound and was never seen again. His shop, with its displays of photographed babies, newly-weds, and hearses stayed empty till it was eventually turned into a barber’s shop.
Omovo tried not to think about Ifeyiwa. Where could all the thinking lead, to what place, what precipice? Occasional companionship, an intense and distant friendship, decorous on the outside, was all he could really ask from her. He wanted more, burnt for more. She needed more – anything less would suffocate her. He turned over on the bed again as if the motion would stop him thinking, but the image of the two birds on the banks of the stagnant stream came back to him. When the image passed he found himself thinking about the painting, and beneath the thoughts was the growing panic that he couldn’t remember any details of that other night in the park. Then he remembered Dr Okocha’s quote: In dreams begin responsibilities. He felt reassured. In loss begins art, he thought. He found himself staring at the wall:
‘...and tomorrow is only a vision.’
He sat up on the bed. What is a dream and what isn’t, he wondered. What is a vision and what isn’t? His head throbbed. He could sleep no longer. He stared at the painting he had done to illustrate a poem Okur had written after their mother’s death. It was an oil painting of three red birds scattered in a concussive expanse of colours. Okur had said that he had written the poem under the influence of marijuana.
Omovo shut his eyes and tried to forget. But one thought led to another. He lay back on his bed hoping to catch a little more sleep, but as he shut his eyes a rush of images poured over him. He couldn’t escape them. Birds, keening, swooped on him. Wherever he turned, thousands of white birds were flying into his eyes. When he fought them off and ran he found some of them clinging to his hair. He pulled them off and screamed when he discovered that all the birds had been blinded. He sat up, and opened his eyes. Everything in the room was in place.
His mouth tasted sour. He needed to brush his teeth and he couldn’t remember where he kept his chewing stick. Throwing the sheet off him, he stood up. His eyes went to the quote on the wall, as if magnetised by the words:
‘But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness…’
He pressed toothpaste on the brush and paused to regard himself in the mirror. He was dismayed at the longish shape of his head. He left the room wondering what on earth Ifeyiwa saw in him. Outside, it was cold and damp. The sky was the colour of an old man’s beard. The air was fresh. And as he walked the length of the compound he could smell the day’s new odours rising from the rooms. Children were balanced on potties. Some of the women had begun the morning’s cooking. Some men, their faces heavy with sleep, stood in front of their rooms brushing their teeth with chewing sticks and scratching their stomachs. Young girls fetched water from the well.
When Omovo came back into the room he embarked on clearing up the profusion of objects on the table. His room was in such a mess that he abandoned the attempt at clarification. Then he stood there uncertain of what to do with himself, apprehensive of what the day held, he became aware that there was something he hadn’t completed. Finally his eyes were drawn to the wall:
‘...and every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day.’
I
Not long afterwards he heard a knock on the sitting room door. Then he heard his father talking to someone in an irritated but controlled tone of voice. Omovo opened his door and looked out and saw it was a Jehovah’s Witness. His father told the woman pointedly that he didn’t want to be preached to and didn’t want any of the pamphlets. He shut the door in the woman’s face. When he turned round he caught Omovo’s eyes. Omovo, flustered, said: ‘Good morning, Dad.’
His father nodded absent-mindedly. He didn’t move and he didn’t look at his son. The wrinkles on his face had deepened further. His eyes had the wandering, unfocussed gaze of one who didn’t want to fix his attention on anything. He looked lost, as if he couldn’t recognise the details of his own sitting room. Omovo wanted to say something to his father. Anything. He wanted, for example, to ask his father to tell him a story. Any story. A story of ancient African heroe
s, of heroes that became gods, of gods that were banished from the earth. He wanted, spontaneously, to sing a song in his native Urhobo language. He wanted to ask about his father’s business. Was it progressing? Were the debts turning into profits? Omovo wanted to ask all these things simultaneously: but he was stopped by the acres of frozen emotions, of cold spaces between them.
The curious thing was that his father stood next to the door with an expectancy about his stance which Omovo only noticed afterwards. After a moment his father made a vague gesture, picked up the Sunday papers from the table, adjusted his wrapper, and went into his room.
When he had gone Omovo felt a vague yearning, coloured by sadness. He decided to do some painting. He painted for an hour. At first the yearning, the sadness, was lost in his preoccupation. Then after a while he began to feel himself forcing the brush on the canvas. The urge to paint thinned. He felt no impulsion of images. He had been working but nothing caught fire inside him, nothing leapt out at him accidentally from the colours he had painted. He wasn’t interested in what he was doing. Then he heard a voice within him say: ‘Why are you doing this?’ He took it as a sign and abandoned the canvas.
Omovo was pacing his room when a boy knocked on his door and told him that Ifeyiwa said she was ready and waiting at the backyard. He remembered his promise to sketch her for a painting. The boy looked at him, waiting for a reply. Ifeyiwa had told him not to come back without one. Omovo said: ‘Tell her I’m coming.’
When the boy left, Omovo felt afraid. He was afraid of the spectacle of artist and model, made sinister by the fact that she was married. It troubled him that such an innocent spectacle could be taken as a public confession, a discreet sign of guilt.